BRITISH  ARTISTS 


Ulrich  Middeldorf 


BRITISH  ARTISTS 


LELY  AND 
KNELLER 


Edited  by  S.  C,  KAINES  SMITH 


BRITISH  ARTISTS 

EDITED  BY 

S.  C.  KAINES  SMITH,  M.A.,  M.B.E. 


The 


Vol. 
I. 


II. 
lit 

IV. 


volumes  at  present  arranged  comprise  the  following, 
here  given  (approximately)  in  chronological  order. 


The  XVI  Century  Painters. 
With  a  note  on  the  influence 
of  Holbein. 

Cornelius  Johnson  and 
Jamesone. 

Dobson  and  Robert  Walker. 
With  a  note  on  the  work 
of  Van  Dyck  in  England. 

J.  Riley,  Greenhill,  J.  M. 
Wright  and  Mary  Beale. 


V.  Lely  and  Kneller. 
VI. 


Thornhill,  Jervas,  Dandridge, 
and  Hudson. 


VII.  Hogarth. 
VIII.  Reynolds. 
IX.  Gainsborough. 
X.  Romney. 
XI.  Raeburn. 

XII.  Hoppner  and  Lawrence. 

XIII.  Opie  and  Cos  way. 

XIV.  Wright  of  Derby. 

XV.  B.  West,  J.  S.  Copley  and  G. 
Stuart.  With  a  note  on 
American  painting  in  the 
XVIIIth  Century. 


Vol. 
XVI. 


Paul  Sandby,  Towne, 
Cozens,  with  a  note  on 
the  rise  of  water- 
colour  painting. 


XVII.  Kauffman,  Bartolozzi  and 
Zoffany.  With  a  note 
on  Foreign  Members  of 
the  Royal  Academy  in 
1768. 

XVIII.  Copley  Fielding. 

XIX.  Cox  and  De  Wint. 

XX.  Morland,   Ibbetson,  and 
James  Ward. 

XXI.  Richard  Wilson  and 
Joseph  Farington. 

XXII.  Barker  of  Bath  and  the 
Bath  Painters. 

XXIII.  John  (old)  Crome,  with  a 

note  on  the  Norwich 
School. 

XXIV.  Cotman. 
XXV.  Constable. 

XXVI.  Bonington  and  Girtin. 

XXVII.  Bewick     and  Clarkson 

Stanneld.  With  a  note 
on  the  Newcastle  group. 

XXVIII.  Turner. 

XXIX.  Alfred  Stevens. 


OTHERS  IN  PREPARATION. 


BRITISH  ARTISTS 

EDITED  BY 

S.  C.  KAINES  SMITH,  m.a. 


LELY  AND 
KNELLER 

By 

C.  H.  COLLINS-BAKER 

Keeper  of  the  National  Gallery 


NEW  YORK 

FREDERICK  A,  STOKES  COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 


Printed  in  Great  Britain 


First  Published  in  1922 


FOREWORD 


I  must  thank  Mr.  J.  D.  Milner,  Director  of 
the  National  Portrait  Gallery,  and  Mr.  Kaines 
Smith  for  their  valuable  assistance  in  the 
compilation  of  this  book. 

Most  grateful  recognition  of  the  privilege  of 
reproducing  pictures  is  due  to  H.M.  the  King, 
The  Earl  of  Craven,  Lord  Lecon field,  Lord  Lee  of 
Fareham,  the  Trustees  of  the  National  Gallery, 
the  Trustees  of  the  National  Portrait  Gallery, 
and  the  Master  of  the  Charterhouse.  Grateful 
acknowledgment  must  be  made  to  the  Medici 
Society  for  the  use  of  two  negatives. 


C.  H.  COLLINS-BAKER. 


EDITORS  FOREWORD 


The  inclusion  of  the  Dutchman  and  the 
German  who  are  the  subjects  of  this 
volume,  in  a  series  devoted  to  British 
artists,  calls  for  no  apology,  and  scarcely 
for  explanation,  for  the  history  of  English 
painting  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth 
centuries  is  not  the  history  of  English 
painters.  It  would  scarcely  be  unjust 
to  describe  the  English-born  painters  of 
that  period  as  parasites,  depending  for 
their  existence  upon  the  transplanted 
Germans,  Flemings,  and  Dutchmen  who 
came  with  craft  and  reputation  ready- 
made  to  cater  for  the  English  need  for 
portrait-painting ;  and,  though  a  few 
of  these  parasitical  dependents  upon  a 
foreign  craft  did  almost  attain  to  an 
independent  existence,  not  one  of  them 
bore  seed  to  carry  on  a  race  of  painters 
independently  rooted  in  their  native  soil. 


vii 


viii 


Editor's  Foreword 


In  the  beginning,  Lely  was  no  more 
an  Englishman  than  Rubens  or  Van  Dyck, 
both  knighted  by  an  English  King,  but 
in  the  end,  by  long  acclimatisation,  he 
became  at  least  as  English  as  the  Court 
for  which  he  worked  ;  and  Kneller,  upon 
whom  his  mantle  fell,  was  far  less  German 
when  he  died  in  1723,  than  the  King  of 
England  who  had  come  from  Germany 
but  nine  years  before.  The  eighty  years 
and  odd  which  cover  the  activity  of  these 
two  foreigners  in  England  cover  also  a 
period  of  English  history  fraught  with 
trouble  and  change,  of  which  the  upshot 
was  the  definite  entry  of  England  into 
relations  with  the  Continental  world — 
— the  period  in  which  England  ceased  to 
be  an  island.  Consequently  it  was  a 
period  of  assimilation  and  adaptation 
rather  than  of  mere  imitation  of  foreign 
ideas,  ideas  of  art  among  the  rest.  Thus, 
it  is  not  a  matter  for  wonder  that  these 
two  men  of  foreign  birth  and  training 
should  have  become  '  English  '  as  their 
predecessors  never  could  have  done,  for 
England  was  in  flux,  and  was  remaking 


Editor  s  Foreword 


herself  from  a  combination  of  elements 
drawn  from  many  sources.  She  might 
almost  have  taken  for  her  motto,  in  place 
of  Dieu  et  mon  Droit,  the  less  aggressive, 
but  more  philosophic  Nihil  humani  a  me 
alienum  puto — adding,  to  save  her  face, 
Honi  soil  qui  mal  y  pense  ! 

In  any  case,  the  influence  of  Lely  and 
Kneller  upon  the  development  of  English 
art  is  so  deep  and  so  far-reaching,  and 
also  so  valuable,  that  any  consideration 
of  painting  in  England  which  did  not 
take  them  into  account  would  be  a  waste 
of  time ;  and,  if  it  is  hurtful  to  our 
national  vanity  to  have  to  acknowledge 
that  we  could  not  have  done  without 
them,  we  can  console  ourselves  with  the 
reflection  that  neither  could  they  have 
done  without  us.  For  Lely  as  a  painter 
is  not  a  Dutchman,  Kneller  is  not  a 
German ;  though  neither  is  wholly 
English,  both  became,  in  the  aims  of  their 
art,  more  English  than  anything  else. 
Unlike  Van  Dyck,  who,  with  chameleon- 
like genius,  adapted  himself  to  any 
atmosphere  in  which  he  found  himself, 


X 


Editor's  Foreword 


and  yet  remained  unalterably  Flemish  in 
all  the  essentials  of  his  art ;  unlike 
Cornelius  Johnson,  who  was  more  at  home 
in  Holland  than  in  England,  for  all  his 
English  birth  and  practice  ;  unlike  their 
imported  imitators  who  could  not  dare 
to  be  themselves,  they  progressed  in 
the  mastery  of  their  art  in  proportion 
as  that  art  became  expressive  of  the 
point  of  view  of  the  country  of  their 
adoption. 

For  Lely,  at  least,  it  cannot  have 
been  an  inspiring  experience.  Neither 
the  political  nor  the  social  conditions 
of  England,  during  his  lifetime,  presented 
an  exalted  spectacle,  and  the  only  wonder 
is  that  he  was  able  to  make  as  fair  a  show 
for  English  men  and  women  as  he  did, 
amid  the  hypocritical  austerity  of  the 
Commonwealth,  and  the  degradation  of 
the  Court  of  Charles  II.  If  he  had  not 
been  so  sound  a  painter,  and  so  devoted 
to  painting  as  he  was,  he  must  have 
despaired  before  the  uninspired  and  un- 
inspiring animals  whom  he  was  called 
upon  to  paint. 


Editor's  Foreword  xi 


There  are,  in  Anthony  Hamilton's 
sprightly  Memoirs  of  tlje  Comte  de 
Grammont,  word-pictures  of  pretty  ladies, 
which  read  like  the  description  of  pictures 
by  Sir  Peter  Lely  ;  and  it  is  all  to  the 
painter's  credit  that  he  has  been  able  to 
present  their  sleepy  beauty  with  all  the 
charm  of  which  it  is  capable,  yet  without 
a  hint  of  the  mire  from  which  it  grew,  as 
no  writer  could  do.  The  achievement  is 
a  triumph  of  art  over  nature,  for  it  is 
neither  in  the  person  nor  in  the  person- 
ality of  the  subject  of  such  pictures  that 
the  beauty  resides,  but  in  the  work  of 
the  painter  himself. 

Mr.  Collins-Baker  has  used,  in  the 
following  pages,  a  rare  discrimination  in 
presenting  a  picture  at  once  of  the 
artists  and  of  the  times  and  conditions 
in  which  they  were  condemned  to  work. 
He  has  shown,  with  a  critical  justice  of 
which  his  great  knowledge  of  the  Stuart 
painters  makes  him  a  master  that,  while 
the  character  of  an  artist's  work,  and  the 
degree  of  his  appeal  to  succeeding 
generations,  may  depend  largely  upon  the 


xii  Editor's  Foreword 

surroundings  and  atmosphere  in  which 
he  lives  and  works,  the  quality  of  his  art 
is  his  own,  and  that  upon  that  quality, 
rather  than  upon  the  relatively  senti- 
mental considerations  of  subject  and 
appeal,  his  real  value  to  art  as  a  whole, 
and  especially  to  the  art  of  the  country 
in  which  he  works,  depends.  Nor  has 
he  ignored  the  question  of  the  degree  in 
which  the  painter  is  able  to  react  to  his 
surroundings,  and  to  translate  them  into 
terms  of  his  craft.  Especially  illumin- 
ating, from  my  own  point  of  view,  is 
his  clear  and  moderate  exposition  of  the 
fact,  which  it  is  all  too  easy  to  overlook, 
that,  though  both  Lely  and  Kneller 
evolved  a  style  of  painting,  and  a  type  of 
portrait,  which  are  English,  in  the  sense 
that  they  are  not  anything  else,  neither 
of  them  ever  arrived  at  a  complete  and 
instinctive  understanding  of  the  English 
character,  and  that,  consequently,  all  their 
portraits  from  first  to  last  are  in  a  sense 
translations  of  that  character  into  a  kind 
of  '  pidgin- English  '  of  their  own.  Their 
portraits  are  seldom,  if  ever,  profound, 


Editor's  Foreword  xiii 

not  because  they  were  not  students  of 
character,  but  because  the  characters 
they  were  called  upon  to  study  were,  in 
certain  essentials,  foreign  to  them  to  the 
last.  It  was,  perhaps,  providential  that 
most  of  the  people  whom  they  painted 
had  not  much  character  of  any  sort  worth 
recording.  It  makes  our  loss  the  lighter, 
and  perhaps  does  something  towards  the 
preservation  of  our  sorely  tried  national 
vanity. 

It  is  strange  that  the  foundations  of 
English  painting  should  have  been  laid 
at  a  time  when  art  had  so  little  to  express 
— strange,  but  not  inexplicable.  When, 
successively,  caprice  masqueraded  as 
power,  to  its  own  undoing,  ugliness  stood 
for  virtue,  and,  in  natural  reaction, 
licence  drove  out  romance  ;  there  was 
little  room  for  any  real  or  clean  emotion 
in  men's  lives,  and  the  artist  who  sought 
beauty  was  bound  to  seek  it  rather  in 
the  method  of  expression  than  in  the 
thing  expressed.  Some  of  the  daintiest, 
and  some  of  the  nastiest  lyrics  in  the 
English   language   were   written  while 


xiv 


Editor's  Foreword 


Lely  was  painting,  and  poor  Herrick's 
plaint,  that  he  was,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
a  very  respectable  parson,  and  not  at  all 
the  kind  of  man  the  subject  of  his  verses 
would  lead  one  to  believe,  reveals  the  fact 
that  the  artist,  if  not  his  public,  had 
arrived  at  a  clear  perception  of  the 
difference  between  beauty  of  form  and 
beauty  of  content,  and,  while  accepting 
as  inevitable  the  content  imposed  upon 
him  by  others,  pursued  independently 
his  own  task  of  the  creation  of  beauty  in 
form.  Such  conditions  actually  leave  the 
artist  more  free  in  the  development  of 
his  art,  for  he  is  not  deluded  by  con- 
siderations of  sentiment  into  believing 
his  subject  to  be  beautiful  in  itself,  nor 
into  regarding  mere  imitation  as  the 
function  of  his  art.  A  part,  at  least,  of 
the  soundness  of  Sir  Peter  Lely's  craft, 
which  was  of  such  immense  service  to 
succeeding  generations,  must  be  attri- 
buted to  the  fact  that  it  was  only  in 
his  craft  that  he  could  take  pleasure,  and 
not  in  the  subjects  which  he  represented 
by  its  means.    To  some  people,  lovers, 


Editor's  Foreword 


xv 


as  all  of  us  are,  of  the  intensely  human 
portraiture  of  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds,  of 
Gainsborough,  and  of  Romney,  the  point 
of  view  presented  by  Mr.  Collins-Baker 
with  regard  to  the  painters  of  the  later 
eighteenth  century  in  this  book  will 
come  as  something  of  a  shock ;  but  a 
little  cool  reflection  will  convince  them  of 
its  justice,  for,  however  much  we  may 
love  or  admire  the  personalities  presented 
to  us  through  the  medium  of  the  art  of 
Reynolds,  we  are  bound  to  admit  that 
his  practice  of  his  craft  never  displays 
the  sound,  methodical,  almost  scientific 
certainty  which  dominates  all  the  work 
of  Lely,  and  survives  even  the  careless- 
ness of  Kneller  in  his  haste  to  make 
money. 

Thus,  the  very  superficiality  of  the  age 
in  which  these  painters  lived  helped  both 
them  and  their  art ;  for,  while,  as  Mr. 
Collins-Baker  points  out,  the  art  of 
portraiture  labours  under  the  disad- 
vantage of  being  obliged  to  stand  or  fall 
by  the  degree  in  which  the  portrait 
impresses  us  with  the  vital  presence  of 


xvi 


Editor's  Foreword 


a  human  being,  so  that  mere  beauty  is  a 
secondary  consideration,  it  is  equally 
true  that  art,  as  a  whole,  is  concerned  with 
matters  more  permanent  and  more 
universal  than  the  personal  qualities  of 
a  human  individual  as  portrayed  by  an 
artist ;  and,  moreover,  the  kind  of  beauty 
with  which  the  art  of  painting  is  concerned 
addresses  itself  primarily  to  the  eye 
rather  than  to  the  mind,  and  is  to  be  found 
on  the  outside,  not  in  the  inside  of  men 
and  things.  Beauty,  in  fact,  is  skin- 
deep,  so  that  in  a  skin-deep  age,  the 
painter  has  the  best  chance  of  devoting 
himself  wholly  to  his  art  and  of  making 
the  most  of  its  possibilities.  Only  a 
supreme  genius  can  establish  in  his  work 
the  perfect  balance  between  heart  and 
eye,  and  then  only  if  his  own  sensibilities 
are  perfectly  balanced.  Neither  Lely  nor 
Kneller  was  a  supreme  genius,  and  if 
they  had  been,  they  would  have  been 
wasted  on  their  times ;  but  both  were 
good  craftsmen,  and  Lely  at  any  rate 
added  much  to  the  craft,  leaving  it 
nearer  to  perfection  than  he  found  it — 


Editor's  Foreword  xvii 

too  near,  in  fact,  for  the  purposes  of  his 
successors.  Reynolds  may  have  made  a 
great  advance  when  he  broke  away  from 
the  tradition  in  which  he  had  been  bred, 
but  it  was  an  advance  rather  in  purpose 
than  in  achievement,  and,  in  making  it, 
he  set  back  the  craft  of  painting  by  a 
century  or  more,  for  the  new  purpose 
demanded  new  methods  which  he  had 
neither  the  knowledge  nor  the  patience 
to  evolve,  while  his  abandonment  of  the 
old  methods  betrayed  him  into  blunders  of 
craftsmanship  which  were  enough  to 
make  the  workmanlike  Lely  turn  in  his 
grave. 

In  fact,  Mr.  Collins-Baker  does  us  a 
great  service  in  reminding  us  that  Hogarth 
was  not  so  much  the  founder  of  the  new 
English  school  of  painting  as  the  last 
and  greatest  exponent  of  the  old  ;  that 
this  old  school  was  derived  through  Van 
Dyck,  and  Rubens,  direct  from  the 
great  painting  of  the  Renaissance,  the 
source  from  which  all  good  craftsmanship 
in  colour,  and  all  great  mastery  of 
line  and  form,  are  drawn  ;    and  that 

B 


xviii  Editor's  Foreword 


the  transmission  of  this  tradition  to 
England  was  the  work  of  the  two  painters 
who  are  the  subject  of  his  book.  By 
them  this  tradition  was  offered  to  English 
artists  as  an  integral  part  of  the  equip- 
ment of  painters  working  to  meet  the 
needs  of  ordinary  English  men  and 
women,  and  those  who  followed  them 
used  it  without  any  particular  concern 
as  to  its  original  source,  naturally  and 
of  necessity. 

To  Lely  and  Kneller,  then,  England 
owes  that  apostolic  succession  in  art, 
which  was  broken  by  the  nonconformity 
of  Reynolds  and  his  followers,  a  non- 
conformity which  sent  them  back  to 
Rome,  to  learn,  imperfectly  and  in 
garbled  fashion,  principles  that  were 
deeply  imbedded  in  the  tradition  which 
they  had  rejected.  One  cannot  honestly 
say  that  the  Georgians  were  to  blame. 
There  was  no  room,  within  the  scope  of 
the  orderly  and  sure  craft  of  the  Restora- 
tion painters,  for  the  superabundant 
sentiment  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
There  was  no  use,  in  a  generation  of  new 


Editor's  Foreword  XiX 


ideas,  for  the  exact  refinements  of  the 
art  of  an  age  of  no  ideas  ;  and  yet  one 
cannot  but  deplore  the  loss  of  simple 
precision,  and  of  the  air  of  command 
and  certainty,  when  they  are  supplanted 
by  experiment,  empiricism,  and  in- 
coherence, even  though  we  know  that  the 
inadequacy  of  the  means  of  expression  is 
the  direct  result  of  the  fact  that  the 
artist  has  so  much  to  say. 

The  Restoration  painters  had  not, 
could  not  have,  much  to  say  about  the 
humanity  in  the  midst  of  which  they 
lived,  and  of  which  they  themselves 
formed  part.  But  what  they  had  to 
say  they  were  able  to  say  with  con- 
summate art — an  art  evolved,  not  created 
ad  hoc,  and  therefore  an  instrument  to 
be  used  with  confidence,  not  a  mere 
make-shift  tool  that  might  break  in  the 
hand  of  the  user.  The  importance  of 
Lely  and  Kneller  in  the  history  of  art 
lies  in  the  fact  that  they  perfected  this 
instrument  for  English  needs,  and  made  it, 
though  they  themselves  were  foreigners, 
an  instrument  which  at  least  one  English 


XX 


Editor's  Foreword 


painter  could  use  for  all  the  needs  of  his 
time.  For  this  reason,  if  for  no  other, 
they  must  be  regarded  as  '  British 
painters/  and  their  claim  to  the  title  is 
made  abundantly  clear  in  the  following 
pages. 

S.  C.  KAINES  SMITH. 


CONTENTS 


Chapter 


I  : 
II  : 

III  : 

IV  : 


Appendix  I 


II 


LELY. 

Biographical  and  Personal  i 
Training  and  Association 

with  Artists 
Style,  Development, 

Characteristics  . 
The     Quality  of 

Artist    and  His 

fluence  .  i' 
List    of  Pictures 

Lely  . 
List  of  Works  on 


the 
In- 

BY 


THE 


15 


23 


43 


61 


Life  and  Art  of  Lely  64 


KNELLER. 

Chapter    I:  Biographical  and  Personal  67 
II  :  Training  and  Association 

with  Artists      .  85 
III  :  Style,  Development, 

Characteristics  .        .  97 
„     IV  :  The     Quality    of  the 
Artist    and    His  In- 
fluence     .        .  .111 
Appendix  I :  List    of    Pictures  by 

Kneller     .        .        .  135 
II :  List   of  Books   on  the 
Life     and     Art  of 
Kneller     .        .        .  138 


LIST  OF  ILLUSTRATIONS 


LELY, 


I. 

Sir  Peter  Lely  and  Family 

Frontispiec  e 

2. 

The  Duchess  of  Portsmouth 

,  22 

3- 

The  Duke  of  Buckingham 

•  34 

4. 

Van  Helmont. 

.  44 

5- 

Baptist  May  . 

•  52 

KNELLER. 

I. 

Thomas  Burnett,  D.D.  . 

.  67 

2. 

Portrait  of  an  Unknown  Man      .  112 

3- 

The  Earl  of  Romney 

.  116 

4 

The  Marquess  of  Tweeddale 

.  122 

CHAPTER  I 


Biographical  and  Personal 


Constant  though  the  pure  current  of 
English  portraiture  has  been  from  the 
days  of  the  early  miniature  painters,  it 
seems  always  liable  to  submersion  by 
stronger  alien  streams.  When  Lely  came 
to  England  in  April,  1641,  in  the  train  of 
the  young  Prince  of  Orange,  he  directly 
challenged  two  fashionable  portrait 
painters :  Cornelius  Johnson,  who  had 
been  here  all  his  life,  and  Van  Dyck,  who 
had  settled  in  London  in  1632.  William 
Dobson,  who  on  Lely's  arrival  was  fast 
acquiring  a  reputation,  makes  a  third. 
In  a  lower  layer  were  less  fashionable  and 
less  gifted  painters  like  Fuller,  Hayls  and 
Robert  Walker.  Studying  the  various 
work  of  all  these  men  whom  Lely  found 
here,  we  observe  that  whatever  of  the  old 
mode  and  spirit  of  English  portraiture 
persisted  in  them  had  been  pretty  wTell 
subjugated  by  the  brilliant  Van  Dyck, 


2 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


The  least  affected  were  Cornelius  Johnson 
and  the  miniature  painters  Cooper  and 
Hoskins.  So  Lely,  coming  straight  from 
Haarlem,  found  in  London  an  atmosphere 
saturated  with  Van  Dyck.  Making  it  his 
business  quickly  to  absorb  this  atmo- 
sphere, he  was  able,  partly  by  luck  and 
partly  by  his  aptitude,  to  step  easily  into 
Van  Dyck's  practice  when,  with  deplor- 
able abruptness,  death  made  it  vacant. 
Thus  the  stream  of  English  portraiture 
received  another  tributary  which,  entering 
through  the  Van  Dyck  channel,  eventually 
submerged  the  native  current,  colouring 
the  water  for  nearly  a  hundred  years. 
Towards  the  end  of  its  course  the  Lely 
influence  was  in  turn  tinged  by  Kneller, 
who  to  Lely  was  what  Lely  had  been  to 
Van  Dyck. 

Pieter  van  der  Faes,  known  as  Peter 
Lely,  Lilly,  Lylly,  and  Lilley,  was  born 
probably  in  Soest,  near  Utrecht,  on  14th 
September,  1618,  son  of  Johan  van  der 
Faes,  a  Captain  of  Foot,  and  Abigail  van 
Vliet,  his  wife.  In  1637  Lely  is  recorded 
in  the  registers  of  St.  Luke's  Guild  in 
Haarlem  as  pupil  of  the  portrait  painter 


Biographical  and  Personal  3 

F.  P.  de  Grebber,  whose  indifferent  efforts 
may  be  examined  in  various  large  groups 
at  Haarlem.  His  pupil  presumably 
worked  in  that  city,  as  Houbraken  stated, 
till  in  1641  he  adventured  to  England  in 
the  suite  of  the  boy  Prince,  William  of 
Orange,  who  came  over  to  marry  our 
Princess  Mary.  He  painted  the  royal 
pair,  and  though,  according  to  Vertue,  he 
was  at  first  employed  by  George  Geldorp, 
a  painter  whose  position  was  probably 
due  more  to  social  gifts  than  to  art,  he 
must  have  stood  on  his  own  feet  very  soon. 
We  know  that  in  1643  he  painted  James, 
Duke  of  York,  and  in  1647  the  King  and 
the  Duke  in  the  double  portrait  (extrava- 
gantly hymned  by  Richard  Lovelace)  now 
at  Syon  House.  Success  of  this  sort  may 
have  somewhat  disquieted  the  established 
favourites,  Johnson  and  Dobson,  whom 
Lely  found  here.  Johnson  certainly  mi- 
grated to  Holland  in  1643,  and  Dobson's 
early  death  in  1646  spared  him  any  further 
heart-burning  and  removed  Lely's  only 
formidable  rival. 

Making  the  most  of  his  chances,  Lely 
had  earned  enough  to  appear  among  the 


4 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


bidders  at  the  auction  of  King  Charles' 
pictures,  held  between  1649-1653.  In 
165 1  he  tried  to  promote  a  scheme  for  the 
decoration  of  Whitehall  with  mural 
paintings,  in  the  company  of  the  aforesaid 
Geldorp  and  Balthazar  Gerbier.*  His 

*  The  Humble  Proposal  to  the  Parliament  of 
Sir  Balthazar  Gerbier,  Kt.,  Peter  Lilly  and 
George  Gelderop. 

"  Concerning  the  representing  in  oil  pictures  of 
all  the  memorable  achievements  since  the  Parlia- 
ment's first  sitting.  It  would  bee  very  fit  to 
have  all  the  most  remarkablest  Battails  and  most 
considerablest  Sieges  of  Towns  in  England, 
Ireland  and  Scotland  to  be  painted,  and  to  beset 
the  same  with  the  portraitures  of  such  Generals 
and  commanders  as  have  during  this  Parlia- 
ment's sitting  fought  and  gained  towns.  To  be 
placed  in  the  Great  Room  and  in  other  Rooms 
and  Galleries  at  Whitehall  for  the  satisfaction  of 
the  present  time  as  also  for  posterity  and  for  an 
encouragement  to  all  such  as  are  in  autoritie  and 
in  Command.  Also  in  the  Great  Room  be  placed 
a  representation  of  the  whole  assembly  of  Parlia- 
ment in  one  large  piece  to  be  placed  at  the 
upper  end  of  the  Great  Room,  formerly  the 
Banquetting  House,  as  also  Portraitures  of  the 
several  members  of  Council  of  State  in  another 
great  piece  for  the  other  end  of  said  Great  Room, 
both  of  them  being  adorned  with  a  comportment 
answerable  to  the  saying  in  85  Psalm,  ver.  n  : 
'  Truth  shall  spring  out  of  the  Earth  and 
Righteousness  shall  look  down  from  Heaven.' 
To  be  most  compleatly  done  by  Choice  Artists 
in  representing  Personages,  Battles  and  Land- 
scapes. The  sitters  to  bear  the  Charges." 
Stowe  MSS.,  2iif  f.  3. 


Biographical  and  Personal  5 

name  occurs  in  the  Waynwright  letters,* 
between  1651-1654,  as  the  painter  of 
Cromwell  and  "  the  best  artist  in  Eng- 
land "  who  had  drawn  "  a  curious  picture 
for  his  Highness  and  also  for  the  Portu- 
guese and  Dutch  Ambassadors."  In  1656 
Lely  had  a  pass  for  Holland  granted  him, 
and  in  1658  he  is  named  in  Saunderson's 
Art  of  Painting  as  one  of  the  best  painters 
in  England.  From  these  casual  relics  of 
Lely's  history  we  can  deduce  that  during 
the  Commonwealth  he  consolidated  the 
reputation  and  practice  he  had  been 
building  up  under  King  Charles  I. 

We  do  not  naturally  associate  Lely  with 
the  Charles  I  and  Commonwealth  periods. 
But  as  regards  the  Charles  II  era  and  Sir 
Peter  one  may  safely  say  that  the  Restora- 
tion e'est  lui.  Immediately  we  speak  of  the 
Merry  Monarch  and  his  customs  we  think 
of  Lely's  set  of  Windsor  Beauties,  now  at 
Hampton  Court.  Indeed,  so  restricted  is 
our  general  view  of  Lely  that  to  many 
his  reputation  rests  entirely  on  these  and 
similar  drowsy,  languorous  ladies. 

♦Sixth  Report,  Hist.  MSS.  Comm.,  p.  426b 
ffarington  MSS. 


6 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


However  that  may  be,  we  have  enter- 
taining evidence  of  Lely's  promptitude  in 
shrewdly  touching  the  soft  side  of 
Charles  II.  In  1661  Lely  was  granted  a 
pension  of  £200  per  annum,  u  as  formerly 
to  Van  Dyck."*  Prima  facie  this  suggests 
that  Charles  was  merely  following  his 
father  in  the  role  of  patron.  But  in  1668, 
when  Lely  "  is  minded  to  lend  into  the 
Exchequer  £1,000  "  and  actually  did  lend 
£500,  another  complexion  is  given  to  this 
seeming  princely  generosity  of  Charles  II. 
For  now  Lely  makes  a  claim  for  £1,200 
"  for  pictures."  The  magnitude  of  this 
sum  led  to  investigation,  in  the  course  of 
which  "  Mr.  Lilly  says  he  quitted  his 
debt  for  his  pension  of  £200  per  annum." 
Further  enquiry  showed  that  nothing  had 
yet  been  paid  of  this  pension  granted 
seven  years  ago,  "  the  said  pension  having 
been  founded  upon  the  said  Lely's  quitting 
a  considerable  debt  due  to  him  from  the 
King."  The  evident  conclusion  is  that 
Lely  had  hastened  to  put  his  pocket  at 

*  For  full  details  of  this  complicated  trans- 
action see  Lely  and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters, 
II.,  pp.  137-140. 


Biographical  and  Personal  7 

the  King's  disposal,  and  that  Charles  had 
helped  himself  so  freely  that  by  1661  a 
pension  of  £200  per  annum  was  considered 
an  adequate  set-off.  And  we  see  that, 
though  in  1668  none  of  this  pension  had 
been  paid,  Lely  had  been  in  a  position  to 
talk  of  lending  £1,000  to  the  Exchequer, 
and  actually  to  hand  out  £500.  It  is 
clear,  then,  that  he  must  have  done  fairly 
well  during  the  Interregnum. 

For  his  prosperous  circumstances  after 
1660  we  have  documentary  evidence. 
Pepys  constantly  refers  to  him  from  1662 
to  1668,  now  as  painting  the  Duchess  of 
York  and  the  King ;  now  as  "  the  great 
painter"  who  was  either  too  busy  to 
accept  or  could  only  book  a  sitting  in  six 
days'  time,  between  7  and  8  a.m.,  and 
whose  "  pomp  of  table  "  was  conspicuous ; 
now  as  painting  the  famous  admirals  of 
the  Dutch  war  ;  now  as  "  a  mighty  proud 
man,  he  is,  and  full  of  state."  Then 
there  is  a  warrant  dated  February,  1663, 
in  the  Lord  Chamberlain's  accounts  for 
"  Mr.  Peter  Lylley,  picture  drawer  to  his 
Mty.  for  the  yeares  1660,  1661,  1662, 
1663,  to  receive  for  such  yeares  20  oz.  of 


8 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


guilt  plate  for  his  New  Yeare's  guifts, 
Mr.  Lilly  having  presented  his  Maty,  with 
considerable  N.Y.G."*  Among  sundry 
other  documentary  references  to  Lely  at 
this  time  we  will  mention  a  letter  from 
Hugh  May,  an  architect  and  apparently 
at  one  time  Lely's  servant,  to  the  Earl  of 
Essex,  reporting  Lely's  decision  as  regards 
the  decoration  of  a  fagade  of  Cashiobury, 
on  which  matter  he  was  acting  as  Lord 
Essex's  adviser. 

Turning  for  a  moment  to  Lely's  personal 
family  history,  we  find  a  tradition  that  he 
had  a  beautiful  English  mistress,  who 
gave  him  two  children,  and  whom  he 
subsequently  married.  A  vague  legend 
suggests  that  this  mistress  was  one  of 
Charles  II's  miscellaneous  offspring.  But 
as  Lely's  children  were  born  sometime  in 
the  i66o's,  and  as  Charles  II's  industry 
in  populating  his  realm  did  not,  as  far  as 
we  know,  begin  seriously  before  the 
Restoration,  this  is  untrustworthy.  The 
facts  are  that  Lely  had  a  daughter  Anne 
and  a  son  John,  both  under  age  in  1680. 
Indeed  John  still  had  a  tutor  in  1689, 

*  Lord  Chamberlain's  Acts,  V.,  315. 


Biographical  and  Personal  9 

which  leads  one  to  suggest  that  he  was 
born  somewhere  about  1670.  Anne  was 
certainly  the  elder ;  in  April,  1680,  a 
reference  to  her  in  the  Verney  Memoirs 
implies  that  she  was  about  sixteen.  Then 
in  January,  1673,*  "  Peter,  son  of  Peter 
Lely,  by  Urcila,  his  reputed  wife,"  was 
baptised  and  buried,  preceded  to  the  grave 
by  his  mother  Ursula.  The  safe  deduc- 
tions are  that  Lely  was  living  with  the 
mother  of  Anne  and  John  about  1663,  and 
that  if  she  were  Ursula,  the  mother  of  the 
infant  Peter,  he  never  married  her.  Anne 
and  John  survived  their  father,  and  John 
was  still  alive  in  1703.1  Lely  also  left  a 
nephew,  Conradt  Wett,  and  a  sister 
Katherina  Maria  Wett,  widow  of  Conradt 
Wett,  burgomaster  in  Zwoll,  in  Guelder- 
land. 

Another  light  on  Lely's  great  position 
is  cast  by  Vertue's  note  that  "  the  Duke 
of  Buckingham  and  Lord  Arundell  lived 
very  splendid  and  sometimes  wanted 
money  and  pawned  some  of  their  pictures 
to  Sir  P.  L.  where  they  remained  :  thus 

*  Registers  of  St.  Paul's,  Co  vent  Garden, 
t  Lely  and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters,  t.;  p.  148. 


10 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


he  got  so  many  fine  capital  pictures." 
Here  we  see  the  neat  ironic  workings  of 
fortune's  wheel.  In  Charles  Fs  time  the 
keenest  rivalry  inspired  the  famous 
Buckingham  to  out-trick  the  great 
Arundel  in  the  game  of  collecting.  And 
now  their  spoils,  so  hardly  won,  quietly 
fall  together,  from  their  sons'  lax  hands 
into  Lely's. 

From  Evelyn,  too,  we  get  a  hint  of 
Lely's  power  as  a  collector.  For  when 
the  Diarist  asked  the  Duke  of  Norfolk,  in 
1683,  if  he  would  part  with  his  Raphael 
cartoons  and  drawings,  Norfolk  said 
"  that  the  late  Sir  P.  Lely  (our  famous 
painter)  had  gotten  some  of  his  best." 
As  we  have  seen,  "  our  famous  painter  " 
was  among  the  bidders  at  the  auction  of 
Charles  Fs  Collections.  Round  the 
nucleus  thus  formed  he  built  such  a 
gallery  of  art — pictures,  drawings,  sculp- 
ture, medals — that  at  his  death  it  realised 
the  vast  sum  of  £26,000.* 

We  have  already  given  an  instance  of 

*  For  a  catalogue  of  part  of  Lely's  collection 
see  Lely  and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters,  Vol.  2, 
PP.  M4-49. 


Biographical  and  Personal  n 

Lely's  position  as  arbiter  of  taste.  Again, 
in  1677,  in  the  Verney  Memoirs  (2nd  ed. 
II,  p.  324),  we  find  him  called  upon  to 
decide  the  merits  of  a  monument  to  Sir 
Roger  Burgoyne,  to  be  executed  for 
Sutton  Church  by  Grinling  Gibbons. 
"  Lely  and  Hugh  May  are  to  decide  when 
the  monument  is  complete  whether  £100 
or  £120  should  be  paid  for  it."* 

This  is  one  of  the  last  references  to  Lely 
at  present  known.  In  Januar}/,  1680,  he 
was  knighted  at  Whitehall.  In  April  a 
chance  allusion  in  the  Verney  Memoirs 
tells  us  of  his  anxiety  to  find  pleasant 
society  for  his  motherless  daughter  "  now 
at  home  with  him."  In  May  we  have  his 
signature  to  a  receipt  for  various  bonds 
taken  from  Sir  R.  Newdigate's  tenants  at 
Arbury  as  security  for  money  owed  him 
for  pictures. f  And  then,  last  of  all,  we 
have  Vertue's  story  that  as  the  master 
was  finishing  the  draperies  of  the  Duchess 
of  Somerset's  portrait  he  died  at  his  easel 

*  See  Lely  and  the  Siuarl  Portrait  Painters, 
II.,  p.  134. 

jVertue,  Add.  MSS.  23069,  p.  31.  The 
D.N.B.  says  that  when  the  Duchess  came  for  her 
sitting  she  was  told  that  Lely  had  suddenly  died. 

C 


12 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


of  an  apoplexy.  He  was  buried  in  St. 
Paul's,  Covent  Garden,  7th  December, 
1680,  aged  62. 

His  will  was  made  4th  February,  1679.* 
His  executors  were  Roger  North,  William 
Stotham,  Hugh  May  and  Sir  J.  Chicheley  ; 
John  and  Anne  Lely,  already  referred  to, 
his  heirs.  He  left  property  in  Lincoln- 
shire— Willingham  Manor  and  Greetwell,f 
and  to  Anne  £3,000  at  her  eighteenth 
birthday.  His  sister  Katherine  Wett  was 
left  £2,000,  and  each  executor  £100.  The 
poor  of  St.  Paul's  parish,  Covent  Garden, 
came  in  for  £100,  and  the  building  fund  of 
St.  Paul's  Cathedral,  £50. 

Here  we  will  note  the  prices  Lely 
charged.  About  1647  he  was  getting  £5 
for  a  head  and  shoulders,  and  £10  for  a 
half-length.  In  1671  Beale's  Diary  tells 
us  that  "  Mr.  Lely's  servant  told  us  his 
master  had  raised  his  rates  from  £15  a 
head  to  £20,  and  his  half-lengths  from 
£25  to  £30  ;   and  that  he  intended  to 

*  Camden  Soc.  Publications,  Wills. 

t  He  seems  to  have  had  other  property 
Warwickshire  way,  in  1677.  Writing  to  Sir  R. 
Newdigate  at  Arbury  he  says  that  he  hopes  to 
go  on  to  Arbury  from  his  own  small  property. 


Biographical  and  Personal  13 

finish  every  picture  with  his  own  hands. 
That  he  took  the  opportunity  of  raising 
his  prices  upon  the  doing  of  several 
pictures  for  the  French  Embassador  and 
the  Duchess  of  Cleaveland/'  By  the  end 
of  his  career  Lely's  prices  were  £20  for  a 
quarter-length,  £40  for  a  half-length,  and 
/80  for  a  full-length  figure. 


CHAPTER  II 


Training  and  Association  with 
Artists 

Lely  was  trained  in  the  Haarlem  Studio 
of  F.  P.  de  Grebber,  from  the  year  1637. 
This  period  was  the  great  mid-period  of 
Frans  Hals.  But  so  far  as  we  can  tell 
Lely  reflects  no  Hals  influence.  What 
his  style  was  in  1641,  when  he  arrived  in 
England,  is  not  clear.  Possibly  tradition 
is  right  in  saying  that  the  picture  of 
Sleeping  Nymphs ,  in  the  Dulwich  Gallery, 
belongs  to  his  Haarlem  days.  Re- 
nouncing them  completely,  whatever  they 
were,  on  landing  in  England,  Lely  at  once 
made  Van  Dyck  his  model.  He  can 
barely  have  met  Van  Dyck,  who  was 
largely  abroad  from  September,  1640,  till 
he  returned  to  London,  a  dying  man,  in 
November,  1641.  But,  of  course,  the 
newcomer  saw  the  fashionable  master's 

15 


1 6  Sir  Peter  Lely 

portraits  in  every  house.  He  must  also 
have  seen  the  work  of  his  two  potential 
rivals,  Cornelius  Johnson  and  William 
Dobson.  We  cannot  but  sympathise 
with  Johnson  in  his  chagrin  at  Lely's 
rapid  success.  For  he,  poor  man,  was 
thus  twice  supplanted  by  an  alien.  Born 
in  London  twenty-five  years  before  Lely, 
Johnson,  outstaying  Van  Somer,  Marc 
Ghaeraedts  and  Mytens,  seemed  sure  of 
chief  place  in  Charles  Fs  artistic  court. 
But  in  1632  Van  Dyck  was  imported  and 
Cornelius  cast  heavily  in  the  shade.  And 
then,  when  that  rival  died  in  1641,  a  new 
interloper,  young  Lely,  was,  as  one  might 
say,  digging  himself  securely  into  royal 
favour.  No  wonder  that  Johnson  threw 
down  his  hand  and  went  abroad,  for  good, 
in  1643. 

Dobson,  eight  years  Lely's  senior,  was 
a  tougher  rival.  Indeed,  he  strikes  us  as 
a  fitter  exponent  of  the  Cavalier  spirit 
than  Lely.  The  ideal  rendering  of  the 
Royalist  youth  of  Charles'  time  is  Van 
Dyck's  Lords  George  and  Francis  Villiers, 
recently  acquired  by  the  National  Gallery. 
And  Dobson' s  Unknown  Gentleman  in  the 


Association  with  Artists  17 

National  Gallery  (lent  by  the  Portrait 
Gallery),  his  Sir  William  F armor  at  Wel- 
beck ;  his  Sir  Richard  Fanshawe  at 
Bratton  Fleming,  his  Sir  Charles  Coterell 
at  Rousham,  and  the  Duke  of 
Northumberland's  group  of  Dobson,  Sir  C. 
Coterell  and  Gerbier  at  Albury,  all  show 
how  easily  Van  Dyck's  courtly  and 
romantic  mantle  hung  on  him.  In  the 
first  part  of  the  Civil  troubles  Dobson  was 
Charles'  favourite  painter.  But,  like  Van 
Dyck,  he  wasted  his  means  and  physique, 
fell  into  the  debtors'  prison  and  was 
bailed  out  to  die,  aged  thirty-six,  in  1646. 

Thus  Lely  had  the  stage  to  himself,  for, 
whatever  practice  painters  like  Robert 
Walker  and  Isaac  Fuller  had,  it  was  not 
of  the  sort  to  cut  into  his.  But  we  must 
remember  this  :  when  Vertue  first  saw  the 
Syon  House  portrait  of  Charles  I  and 
James,  Duke  of  York,  he  could  not  credit 
it  as  Lely's  work,  rather  supposing  it  to  be 
by  Dobson  or  Fuller.  We  know  hardly 
anything  of  Fuller  now,  but  it  is  plain 
that  he  must  have  been  a  capable  follower 
of  Van  Dyck.  As  for  Walker,  all  that  we 
can  say  is  that  possibly  Lely  took  a  hint 


i8 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


from  him  as  to  the  appropriate  solemnity 
for  Commonwealth  portraiture.  For  he 
evidently  recognised  that  the  mood 
fashionable  in  Cavalier  days  had  to  be 
toned  down  for  Commonwealth  tastes. 
During  the  Commonwealth,  as  has  been 
stated,  Lely,  having  survived  or  lived 
down  his  older  rivals,  became  known  as 
the  best  painter  in  England.  Though  this 
position  was  nolrTormidably  challenged 
after  the  Restoration,  we  should  cast  an 
eye  over  the  rising  generation  of  his 
rivals.  The  most  notable  was  the  Scots* 
Joseph  Michael  Wright  (1625  ?-i70o) 
who,  after  an  education  in  Italy,  settled 
in  England  circa  1652.  He  is  conspicuous 
because  he  never  submitted  to  Lely's  in- 
fluence. Indeed,  of  the  painters  of  that 
time  he  seems  the  most  various,  so  that 
even  the  close  student  will  occasionally  be 
puzzled  to  account  for  what  may  well  be 
an  unusual  specimen  of  Wright's  por- 
traiture. Technically  inferior  to  Lely, 
and  never  perhaps  a  fine  painter,  Wright 
is  interesting  by  virtue  of  the  restraint 
and  breeding  of  most  of  his  portraits  and 
for  his  pleasant  schemes  of  pale  colour. 


Association  with  Artists  19 

A  good  example  of  his  work  is  the 
Thomas  Chiffinch,  in  the  National  Portrait 
Gallery.  A  trifle  of  business  connected 
him  with  Lely,  whose  empty  house  in 
Covent  Garden  he  rented  for  a  picture 
exhibition  in  1686. 

Lely's  next  conspicuous  rival  was 
Gerard  Soest  (c.  1605-1681),  a  Dutchman 
who  came  to  England  shortly  after  Lely. 
He,  too,  was  independent  of  Lely's  in- 
fluence, though  naturally  he  followed  the 
same  "  movements/'  Thus  his  early 
work  in  England  was  Van  Dyckian,  but 
fresher  and  more  refined  than  Lely's. 
His  next  stage  was  appropriately  austere 
for  the  Commonwealth,  his  third  was 
floridly  in  keeping  with  the  Restoration. 
Soest  in  his  top  form  was  nearly  Lely's 
equal  as  painter  and  colourist ;  but  so 
inconstant  was  that  form  that  Lely  takes 
first  place.  On  the  other  hand,  if  we 
were  to  pick  six  of  Soest' s  most  striking 
portraits,  ranging  from  the  1640' s  up  to 
the  sixties,  we  should  be  surprised  at  their 
variety  of  excellence.  He  is  indifferently 
represented  in  the  Portrait  Gallery. 

John     Hayls     (1600  ?-i679),  who 


20 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


certainly  was  working  in  London  during 
the  Commonwealth  and  onwards,  was  a 
reputed  rival  to  Lely.  But  the  quality  of 
his  portraits  would  not  have  broken  Lely's 
peace  of  mind.  In  Jacob  Huysmans 
(1633  ?-i696)  Lely  had  a  different  calibre 
of  rival.  This  Dutch  painter  came  to 
England  at  the  Restoration,  and  set  him- 
self to  imitate  Lely,  as  Lely  had  imitated 
Van  Dyck.  A  slick  and  competent 
painter,  with  a  sad  weakness  for  the 
rococo  but  barely  a  dash  of  serious 
interpretation  in  him,  Huysman,  or 
Houseman,  painted  many  portraits  which 
pass  for  indifferent  Lelys  :  indeed,  with 
one  sitter,  James,  Duke  of  York,  he  did 
so  well  that  a  tutored  eye  is  needed  to 
distinguish  Huysman  at  his  best  from 
Lely  at  his  second  best. 

Of  Lely's  other  alien  rivals  we  will  just 
note  two  birds  of  passage,  Pieter  Nason, 
who  seems  to  have  worked  in  England 
about  1663,  and  Pieter  Borsseler,  who 
certainly  was  here  about  1665.  His 
portraits  of  Sir  William  Dugdale  and  his 
Wife,  and  of  Orlando  Bridgeman  are  im- 
pressive works.    These  sound  and  accom- 


Association  with  Artists  21 


plished  painters  could  hardly  be  confused 
with  Lely.  Nor  can  we  here  dwell  on 
Lely's  apprentices  and  imitators,  such  as 
William  Wissing  (1656-1687)  ;  Messrs. 
Edward  Hawker  (1641-1721  ?),  Lankrink 
and  Sonnius,  his  studio  hands,  and  Mary 
Beale  (1633-1695  ?).  John  Greenhill 
(1641  ?-i676)  was  Lely's  best  pupil  and 
later  an  independent  painter  of  some 
power. 


CHAPTER  III 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics 

Coming  to  England  straight  from  Holland 
in  his  twenty-third  year,  Lely  must  have 
been  sharply  struck  by  the  Van  Dycks  he 
saw  all  round  him.  A  new  kind  of 
painting  and  a  new  world  of  sitters  were 
revealed  to  him.  No  wonder  that, 
scrapping  whatever  preconceptions  he 
brought  over,  he  sat  down  at  once  to 
understudy  Van  Dyck.  But  we  must  note 
what  may  seem  rather  curious.  He 
did  not  model  his  new  style  on  Van  Dyck's 
style  in  1640  ;  instead  he  chose  the 
master's  portraits  of  about  1635.  So, 
speaking  generally,  we  find  Lely's  first 
English  manner  of  flesh-painting  is 
smoothly  thin,  with  lightly  loaded  lights 
and  thin  shadows.  At  first,  we  may  be 
sure,  it  was  coarse,  compared  with  Van 
Dyck's.    But  in  a  year  or  two  it  had 

23 


24 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


become  delicately  finished.  Iri  contrast 
with  this  smooth  and  even  flesh-painting, 
his  first  draperies  are  loose  and  coarse  in 
handling  :  a  student's  clumsy  exaggera- 
tion of  the  sweeping,  flashing  lights  of 
Van  Dyck's  brilliant  brush  work.  From 
the  first  Lely  was  solid,  even  heavy,  in 
his  modelling,  and  his  quite  early  draperies 
have  that  richness  of  tone  and  restraint 
of  colour  which  made  a  good  colourist. 

As  regards  character,  or  temper,  his 
first  English  portraits  are  of  two  main 
kinds  :  (i)  heavily  Dutch  and  bourgeois, 
and  (2)  markedly  influenced  by  the  more 
courtly  and  attractive  cast  of  Van  Dyck's 
and  Dobson's  work.  From  this  we  may 
reasonably  infer  that  he  had  a  little 
trouble  in  adapting  his  native  outlook  to 
the  conditions  he  found  fashionable  over 
here.  But  we  also  know  from  the  signed 
and  dated  portrait  of  James,  Duke  of 
York,  at  Syon  House  (reproduced  in  The 
Connoisseur,  Vol.  55,  pp.  3-5),  that  by 
1643  he  had  gone  far  towards  assimilating 
the  correct  Van  Dyckian  flavour.  We 
also  know  that  by  1647,  when  he  painted 
the  Syon  House  Charles  I  with  the  Duke 


Style,  Development ,  Characteristics  25 

of  York  (v.  same  issue  of  The  Connoisseur), 
he  was  able  to  produce  work  which 
Vertue  would  have  confused  with  Dob- 
son's,  and  which  authorities  of  our  own 
time  have  attributed  to  Van  Dyck.  On 
this  point  we  may  add  that  even  now  (or 
at  least  till  quite  recently)  a  typical  Lely 
Portrait  of  a  Man  (1678),  is  hung  in  the 
Louvre  under  Van  Dyck's  name,*  and 
that  in  so  well-known  a  collection  as  that 
at  Ham  House  at  least  two  portraits  by 
Lely  (one  signed)  are  catalogued  as  by  the 
greater  master.  And  for  a  singularly 
charming  portrait  by  him,  once  ascribed 
to  Dobson,  I  will  refer  readers  to  the 
Thomas  Fanshawe,  reproduced  in  Lely 
and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters,  L,  p.  152, 
and  the  Art  Journal,  1911,  p.  305. 

Lely's  technique  in  the  period  under 
consideration,  circa  1641-1650,  is,  as  we 
have  said,  uniformly  "  finished"  and,  in 
the  flesh,  smoothly  and  evenly  painted. 
The  half-tones  and  half-lights  are  painted, 
as  it  were,  in  a  thin  enamel,  on  which  the 
full  lights  are  laid  a  little  more  solidly, 

*  See  The  Burlington  Magazine,  Vol.  22, 
p.  288. 


2b 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


but  not  loosely  and  flatly.  The  colour  of 
his  flesh  half-tones  is  curiously  subtle  ;  a 
depth  of  warm  gray  obtained  by  careful 
superimposition  of  a  silvery  film  over  a 
gray-purplish  ground.  Copyists  of  these 
half-tones  invariably  get  a  dead  or  flat 
colour,  without  the  suggestion  of  bloom 
which  we  find  in  the  genuine  thing.  The 
casual  observer  of  Lely  would  be  rather 
bothered  to  reconcile  the  technique  of  his 
first  decade  with  that  of  his  last,  some 
twenty  years  later,  and  even  more 
puzzled  to  recognise  in  the  painter  of  the 
Van  Dyckian  early  pieces  we  have  alluded 
to,  the  better-known  Lely  of  the  Court 
Beauties  and  the  gross  men-about-town 
of  Charles  ITs  day. 

The  gap  between  these  very  different 
types  of  Lely  is  filled  by  his  Common- 
wealth portraiture,  c.  1650-1660.  In  this 
period,  as  is  natural,  he  trimmed  the 
character  of  his  portraits  to  suit  the  more 
austere  temper  of  the  time.  That  is  to 
say,  we  do  not  find  quite  the  same  effort 
to  make  his  men  graceful  and  decorative, 
and  though  his  ladies  wear  much  the  same 
fashion  of  decollete  dress,  the  accent  is  laid, 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  27 

not  on  their  physical  attractions,  but  on 
their  seriously  correct  demeanour,  malgre 
their  short  sleeves  and  ample  busts.  It  is 
really  quite  remarkable  how  this  con- 
sciousness in  Lely  of  having  to  mind  his 
P's  and  Q's  affects  the  character  of  most 
of  his  Commonwealth  portraits.  The 
main  result  is  that  when  he  is  dealing 
with  a  relatively  young  man  or  woman, 
modishly  dressed  (as,  despite  the  Puri- 
tanic severity  of  the  authorities,  the 
less  godly  persisted  in  being),  he  generally 
succeeds  in  making  the  men  rather 
awkward  and  dull  and  the  ladies  positively 
plain.  And  we  know  that,  as  soon  as  the 
embargo  on  physical  attractiveness  was 
raised,  he  painted  precisely  the  same  kind 
of  sitters,  in  much  the  same  costume,  as 
gallant  and  decorative  figures.  So  that 
we  feel  a  little  sorry  for  the  pretty  ladies 
(using  this  phrase  unequivocally)  who,  as 
luck  had  it,  sat  to  Lely  between  1650- 
1660. 

On  the  other  hand,  this  period  gives  us 
some  of  his  most  impressive  work,  for  it 
evoked  a  serious  interpretative  effort.  If 
he  had  to  paint  one  of  a  severe  and 
D 


28 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


thoughtful  cast,  as,  for  example,  the  Sir 
Harry  Vane  the  Elder,  at  Ham  House,  or 
the  Lady  Bedel  (reproduced  in  Lely  and 
the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters,  I.,  p.  154),  in 
the  Fanshawe  Collection,  he  would  pro- 
duce portraits  of  dignity  and  insight 
which,  in  a  serious  conspectus  of  his 
work,  rank  higher  than  his  much  better 
known  and  more  expensive  society 
beauties.  As  regards  the  technique  of 
this  intermediate  period  we  may  say  that 
in  method  it  was  a  continuation  of  the 
earlier :  evenly  solid  in  texture,  sober  in 
spirit,  and  increasingly  projective  in  form. 
In  effect,  these  ten  years  completed  what 
we  may  call  Lely's  preparatory  period, 
which  made  possible  the  mastery  and 
science  of  his  later  style. 

With  the  Restoration  came  a  release  of 
energy.  A  nature  like  Charles  IFs  would 
not  improve  in  the  lax  conditions  which 
exile  and  dislocation  of  life  impose. 
Once  the  reins  of  tradition  and  habitual 
direction  were  cut  by  the  destruction  of 
divine  rights  ;  once  the  amour  propre  of  a 
fugitive  king  was  lacerated,  a  young  man 
of  far  stronger  fibre    than  Charles  II 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  29 


might  well  be  rotted  by  chagrin  and  the 
sort  of  hospitality  exiled  princes  usually 
receive.  Restored  to  kingship  by  intrigue 
but  with  no  rehabilitating  consciousness 
of  personal  achievement,  such  a  one  as 
Charles  would  be  confirmed  in  the  cynical 
materialism  induced  by  his  experience. 
Bored  and  disillusioned,  corrupt  and 
utterly  selfish,  Charles  had  about  as  much 
sense  of  public  or  private  duty  as  a  late 
Roman  Emperor.*  So  Lely,  discarding 
the  Puritanic  business,  had  rapidly  to 
adapt  himself  to  the  reaction  which 
attended  such  a  king. 

*  Thackeray's  passing  comment  on  Charles  II 
in  exile  is  famous. 

"  What  spectacle  is  more  august  than  that  of  a 
great  king  in  exile  ?  Who  is  more  worthy  of 
respect  than  a  brave  man  in  misfortune  ?  Mr. 
Addison  has  painted  such  a  figure  in  his  noble 
piece  of  Cato.  But  suppose  fugitive  Cato 
fuddling  himself  at  a  tavern  with  a  wench  on 
each  knee,  a  dozen  faithful  and  tipsy  companions 
of  defeat,  and  a  landlord  calling  out  for  his  bill ; 
and  the  dignity  of  misfortune  is  straightway  lost. 
The  Historical  Muse  turns  away  shamefaced 
from  the  vulgar  scene,  and  closes  the  door — on 
which  the  exile's  unpaid  drink  is  scored  up — upon 
him  and  his  pots  and  his  pipes,  and  the  tavern- 
chorus  which  he  and  his  friends  are  singing. 
Such  a  man  as  Charles  should  have  had  an 
Ostade  or  Mieris  to  paint  him." 


30 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


It  was  not  a  question  of  a  new  tech- 
nique, but  of  transferring  the  stress  from 
sobriety  and  decorum  to  sensuous  appeal. 
Lely's  long  practice  in  careful  and  subtle 
texture  painting  bore  its  ripest  fruit  in  the 
ten  years  following  the  Restoration.  That 
fruit  is  seen  at  Hampton  Court  in  the 
series  of  Beauties.  The  chief  example  of 
this  really  remarkable  subtlety  of  finish  is 
his  Comtesse  de  Grammont  at  Hampton 
Court.  Rather  later,  but  hardly  less 
accomplished,  is  the  Duchess  of  Ports- 
mouth at  Coombe  Abbey.  Such  finish  is 
not  great  art,  because  the  impulse  behind 
it  is  materialistic.  But  the  technical 
capacity  of  a  painter  who  can  thus  render 
the  loveliness  of  beautifully  groomed 
flesh,  and  the  utmost  niceties  of  texture 
and  delicate  colour,  in  a  quality  of  paint 
which  is  as  fresh  and  unlaboured  as  you 
please,  is  very  high.  Moreover,  in  these 
portraits  there  is  a  solidity  of  modelling 
and  a  breadth  of  atmospheric  feeling, 
which  are  exceptional  in  life-size  works  so 
subtly  finished.  High-minded  critics 
(labouring  perhaps  under  some  sup- 
pression), with  a  passion  for  the  gaunt  and 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  31 

a  distrust  of  the  carnal,  dislike  Lely  quite 
instinctively  because  he  suggests  more 
sensuously  and  convincingly  than  any 
other  painter,  including  Boucher,  the 
provocative  touch  and  texture  of  the 
body.  And  in  so  far  as  success  on  these 
lines  is  cheap  their  instinct  is  right.  But 
a  less  subjective  criticism  in  justice 
recognises  that  Lely  performed  what, 
after  all,  was  his  job  with  about  as 
perfect  a  technique  as  could  be  asked. 

These  sensuous  and  delicately  finished 
women  portraits  are,  in  the  main,  the 
substance  of  Lely's  popular  reputation. 
But  they  show  only  one  side  of  his  art  and 
his  technique.  Contemporary  with  them 
is  a  very  different  series  of  men  portraits, 
and  exceptional  instances  of  women 
portraits  ;  for  example,  the  fine  Unknown 
Lady,  at  Compton  Verney,  reproduced  in 
Lely  and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters,  I., 
p.  166.  Lely,  more  than  most  painters, 
practised  a  distinct  technique  in  his  men 
portraits,  so  that  when  we  pay  our  first 
visit  to  Greenwich  Hospital,  we  are 
surprised  at  the  difference  between  his 
Admirals    there    and   his    Beauties  at 


32  Sir  Peter  Lely 


Hampton  Court.  For  the  "  Flagg-men  " 
are  painted  with  a  direct  strength  and 
expressiveness  of  brushwork,  and  with  a 
feeling  for  fat,  clean  coups  de  pinceau 
which  we  never  should  have  associated 
with  the  delicate  enamel  of  the  Comtesse 
de  Grammont.  In  these  portraits  play  is 
made  with  the  opposition  of  loaded  pig- 
ment to  thin  half-tones,  in  which  the 
canvas  grain  is  visible.  If  not  quite  as 
fine  as  the  best  of  the  Admiral  series  at 
Greenwich,  the  impressive  Van  Helmont 
in  the  National  Gallery  is  an  admirable 
example  of  Lely's  1660-1670  technique. 
An  interesting  comparison  with  the 
powerful,  rugged  brushwork  of  these 
Admirals  is  the  contemporary  Sir  William 
Temple,  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 
Suiting  his  method  to  his  sitter,  a  sleek 
and  courtly  gentleman,  Lely  uses  the 
finished,  even  texture  of  one  of  his 
women  portraits.  Another  portrait  in 
this  Gallery  most  valuably  shows  us  the 
carpentry  of  his  technique.  In  the  un- 
finished Prince  Rupert,  apparently  taken 
as  far  as  two  sittings,  we  can  see  his  under- 
painting  and  the  succeeding  layer,  and 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  33 

enjoy  his  clean  square  draughtsman- 
ship. 

By  about  1670  we  note  a  new  direction 
in  Lely's  technique.  Like  Van  Dyck  in 
his  last  phase,  Lely  turned  to  the  con- 
sideration of  other  problems  than  the 
interpretation  of  surface  delicacy  and  the 
sculpturesque  building  up  of  planes.  He 
began  to  take  an  interest  in  the  enveloping 
action  of  light  and  atmosphere.  By  1665 
he  had  taken  delicacy  about  as  far  as  he 
could  and  thoroughly  explored  the 
resources  of  the  technique  employed  in 
the  Admirals  type  of  portrait.  The  next 
and  last  marked  phase  of  his  technique 
was  comparatively  impressionistic.  His 
paint  is  looser,  more  freely  and  heavily 
brushed  in,  and  his  planes  are  less  sharply 
divided.  Vertue  makes  distinct  mention 
of  this  characteristic  of  Lely's  last  manner, 
speaking  of  his  "  fine  freedom  of  pencill, 
especially  at  the  last."  I  can  name  no 
finer  example  of  this  freedom  than  the 
Unknown  Man,  owned  by  Mrs.  Thompson, 
and  reproduced  in  the  Art  Journal,  191 1, 
p.  309.  Of  course,  in  roughly  dating  his 
final  style  1670-1680,  I  do  not  imply  that 


34 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


as  January  ist,  1670  (or  March  25th  in  the 
old  reckoning),  dawned  Lely  broke  out 
in  this  new  atmospheric  manner.  But 
we  know  that  from  the  end  of  the  1660's 
his  style  was  becoming  freer,  and  that  by 
1675  it  was  habitually  loose  and  broad. 
For  ready  reference  I  may  cite  the  George 
Villiers,  2nd  Duke  of  Buckingham,  No.  279 
in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery,  as 
typical  of  Lely's  late  style.  Gross,  florid, 
sensual,  this  is  what  the  fair-haired  boy  in 
Van  Dyck's  George  and  Francis  Villiers 
in  the  National  Gallery  had  become  after 
some  thirty  years  of  industrious  deteriora- 
tion. 

An  interesting  contemporary  comment 
upon  this  change  of  method  occurs  in  the 
note-books  of  Mary  Beale's  husband,  with 
reference  to  the  portrait  of  Dr.  Tillotson 
painted  by  Lely  at  Beale's  commission. 
Every  stage  of  the  painting  is  mentioned 
under  dates  ranging  from  June  to  Septem- 
ber, 1672,  and  the  observation  of  the 
diarist  is  keen  and  technical,  for  it  was 
exercised  with  the  primary  object  of 
enabling  his  wife  to  imitate  Lely's 
methods. 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  35 

The  entry  of  June  5th  refers  to  the 
dead-colouring,  as  follows  : — 

"  Dr.  Tillotson  sat  for  about  three  hours 
to  Mr.  Lely  for  him  to  lay  in  a  dead  colour 
of  his  picture  for  me.  He  apprehending 
the  colour  of  the  cloth  upon  which  he 
painted  was  too  light  before  he  began  to 
lay  on  the  flesh  colour,  he  glazed  the 
whole  place,  where  the  face  and  haire 
were  drawn,  in  a  colour  over  thin, 
with  Cullen's  earth,  and  a  little  bonn- 
black  (as  he  told  us)  made  very  thin 
with  varnish.' ' 

And  on  1st  August,  the  following 
pathetic  entry  occurs  : — 

"  Dr.  Tillotson  sat  to  Mr.  Lely  about 
three  hours  for  the  picture  he  is  doing  for 
me,  this  is  the  fourth  time,  and  I  believe 
he  will  paint  it  (at  least  touch  it)  over 
again.  His  manner  in  the  painting  of 
this  picture  this  time  especially  seemed 
strangely  different  both  to  myself  and 
my  dearest  heart  from  his  manner  of 
painting  the  former  pictures  he  did  for  us. 
This  wee  thought  was  a  more  conceiled 
misterious  scanty  way  of  painting  then 
the  way  he  used  formerly,  which  wee  both 


36 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


thought  was  a  far  more  open  and  free, 
and  much  more  was  to  be  observed  and 
gain'd  from  seeing  him  paint  then,  then 
my  heart  cou'd  with  her  most  careful 
marking  learn  from  his  painting  either 
this,  or  Dr.  Cradock's  picture  of  his  doing 
for  Dr.  Patrick/' 

One  can  picture  the  two  peering  over 
the  painter's  shoulder,  more  and  more 
bewildered  at  every  stroke  of  the  brush, 
as  this  "  conceiled  misterious  scanty  way 
of  painting  99  grew  before  their  eyes  ;  and 
the  long  and  earnest  discussion  between 
them  afterwards,  as  they  debated  the 
possibility  of  penetrating  the  mystery  of 
the  new  style  ;  one  is  inclined  to  wonder 
whether,  in  face  of  this  new  development, 
they  felt  that  they  were  getting  full 
value  for  the  twenty-four  pounds  nine 
shillings  in  Lakes  and  Ultramarines,  and 
one  ounce  of  Ultramarine  of  the  richest 
(for  Beale  dealt  in  colours),  which, 
together  with  a  guinea  in  cash,  they  had 
paid  for  the  two  portraits  of  Dr.  Tillotson 
and  Dr.  Stillingfleet. 

Hitherto  we  have  only  considered 
Lely's  portraits,   which   constitute  his 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  37 

main  life  work.  He  painted  other  things 
when  he  could  find  time.  The  best  known 
to  us  are  the  Methuen  Lely  and  his 
Family,  now  in  Lord  Lee  of  Fareham's 
Collection  ;  the  Chatsworth  Europa,  and 
the  Dulwich  Gallery  Sleeping  Nymphs. 
Of  these,  in  my  judgment,  the  finest  is 
the  first,  and  it  is  reproduced  as  a  frontis- 
piece to  this  volume.  From  it  we  can 
infer  how  high  a  place  Lely  would  take  as 
a  painter  of  romantic  genre,  on  a  large 
scale,  had  he  made  that  his  main  work. 
It  is  difficult  to  think  of  another  picture 
of  that  period  which  exhibits  so  con- 
vincingly the  spirit  of  the  defunct 
Renaissance  romanticism.  Lely's  con- 
temporaries in  the  Netherlands  (of  course, 
Rembrandt  is  not  involved  in  any  such 
discussion)  certainly  showed  no  com- 
parable spirit.  And  if  we  turn  to  Italy 
we  shall  not  easily  discover,  among  the 
late  XVIIth  century  painters,  whose 
minds  were  bent  on  the  dark  problems  of 
chiaroscuro,  either  such  refinement  of 
mood  or  such  beauty  of  light  and  colour. 
There  is  in  the  collection  of  H.H.  the 
Maharaja  Gaekwar  of  Baroda  a  Judith 


38 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


and  Holofernes*  by  Lely,  and  an  Adorning 
of  Venus  and  The  Nine  Muses  at  Pens- 
hurst  are  said  to  be  his.t 

Walpole  mentions  most  of  these,  and 
also  a  Cimon  and  Iphigenia  belonging  to 
Lord  Pomfret,  and  a  Judgment  of  Paris, 
which  was  mezzotinted  by  Lens  ;  and  of 
sketches  in  black  and  white,  a  Holy 
Family,  which  fetched  five  pounds  in 
Streater's  sale,  and  a  bacchanalian  subject 
of  "  four  or  five  naked  boys  sitting  on  a 
tub,  the  wine  running  out  "  which  was 
commended  by  Vertue. 

Besides  these  subject  pictures,  Lely 
painted,  in  fatuous  moments,  Barbara 
Villiers  and  one  of  her  bastard  children, 
as  the  Madonna  and  Child,  and  in  the 
same  guise  Louise,  Duchess  of  Ports- 
mouth. He  also  painted  Nell  Gwyn, 
naked  and  leaning  on  a  bed,  with  her 
child.  This  picture,  commissioned  for 
that  child's  father,  gave  Charles  II,  as 
Vertue  notes,  an  excuse  for  coming  to 
Lely  to  see  Nell  painted,  "  when  she  was 
naked,    on    purpose."    The    Duke  of 


*  See  The  Connoisseur,  Vol.  57,  pp.  1,  3,  5. 
f  See  The  Connoisseur,  Vol.  16,  p.  24. 


Style,  Development,  Char  act  eristics  39 

Buckingham  helped  himself  to  this 
picture  when  James  II  fled.*  In  a  dark 
closet  at  Hampton  Court  used  to  hang  a 
Magdalen  by  Lely  ;  but  I  never  ascer- 
tained its  quality.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  Duke  of  Grafton  has  a  Susannah  and 
the  Elders  of  admirable  quality,  and  at 
Ghent  is  a  fine  Samson  and  Delilah, 

A  word  should  be  said  here  about  Lely's 
drawings,  of  which  a  fine  representation 
is  in  the  British  Museum  Print  Room. 
They  are  portrait  studies  solidly  modelled 
and  crisp  in  touch.  The  best  are  James 
Maitland,  Duke  of  Lauderdale,  and 
Edmund  Waller.  The  latter  is  an  early 
drawing,  somewhat  smooth  and  tight,  in 
chalk,  heightened  with  white,  on  gray 

*  In  1 91 5  my  attention  was  drawn  to  a  photo- 
graph of  a  picture  of  a  lady  reclining,  in  Danae's 
usual  position  and  attire,  on  a  white  drapery, 
propped  by  white  pillows.  A  child's  head  and 
shoulders  appear  behind  her  raised  right  thigh. 
An  urn  stands  on  the  right.  The  canvas 
measured  5  ft.  by  4  ft.,  and  was  in  a  Mr.  G.  L. 
West's  possession.  From  the  small  print  I  could 
not  make  sure  that  the  picture  was  in  fact  by 
Lely.  But  it  clearly  was  related  to  a  Lely, 
roughly  answering  this  description  of  Nell  Gwyn 
and  Her  Child.  Walpole  mentions  a  "  naked 
Venus  asleep  "  at  Windsor,  which  may  have 
been  this  picture. 


40 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


paper.  But  it  shows  Lely's  power  of  ex- 
pressing projection  by  pure  line  work. 
The  date  of  this  drawing  is  about  1650, 
and  the  Portrait  of  Waller  at  Holkham  is 
clearly  related  to  it.  As  far  as  I  can  tell, 
Lely's  drawings  are  not  so  much  pre- 
liminary studies  for  actual  pictures  as 
first  essays  on  his  part  to  familiarise 
himself  with  his  sitters.  The  Lauderdale, 
a  much  later  drawing,  is  one  of  the  most 
masterly  Lely  drawings  that  has  survived. 
It  is  far  broader  in  treatment  than  the 
Waller,  and  much  more  atmospheric. 
The  modelling  is  massive  and  the  ex- 
pression of  fused  light  most  remarkable. 

In  the  British  Museum  also  are  two 
bust  drawings  of  ladies  of  the  Court.  As 
regards  likeness  they  are  far  less  con- 
ventional than  most  of  Lely's  portraits. 
One  of  them,  representing  Barbara 
Villiers,  in  a  hood,  gives  us  a  very  different 
impression  of  that  notorious  person  from 
the  impression  derived  from  the  stock 
Lely  portrait.  All  these  drawings,  I 
think,  are  signed  either  in  full  or  in 
monogram.  They  are  reproduced  in  the 
Art  Journal  of  1-911,  pages  337  onward. 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  41 

It  would  be  interesting  to  know  if  Lely 
ever  sketched  designs  for  the  scheme  of 
decorating  Whitehall  with  battle  and 
siege  subjects.  So  far  as  I  know,  no  traces 
of  such  an  undertaking  have  come  down 
to  us. 


CHAPTER  IV 


The   Quality  of  The  Artist,  and 
His  Influence 

Had  Lely  worked  in  another  era,  his 
reputation  would  probably  be  higher. 
For,  I  think,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that, 
instinctively  and  quite  unreasoningly,  we 
are  prejudiced  against  the  perruque 
period.  Of  course,  it  may  be  said  that  a 
painter  is  born  into  the  time  which  he 
deserves.  Suspecting  there  may  be  a 
profound  truth  in  this  contention,  I  will 
not  argue  it.  But  there  remain  grounds 
for  thinking  that,  had  Lely  painted  wig- 
less  Burghers,  like  Van  der  Heist  and  Hals, 
no  better  than  he  painted  Restoration 
Courtiers,  we  should  think  much  more  of 
him.  We  can  test  this  theory  and  amuse 
ourselves  by  speculating  how  Van  Dyck 
would  have  fared,  had  he  been  doomed  to 
paint  the  perruque  portraits  which  Lely, 
Kneller,  Largilliere  and  Rigaud  had  to 
paint.    And  we  can  consider  the  clear 


44 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


fact  that  not  a  single  portrait  painter  of 
the  perruque  period  is  taken  very  seriously. 
There  can  be  no  doubt,  I  think,  that  Lely's 
reputation  has  suffered  by  this  misfortune 
of  his  place  in  time  and  by  his  coincidence 
with  an  age  of  monstrous  artificiality. 
I  have  no  doubt  at  all  that  if  Van  Dyck's 
two  Villiers  Boys  and  Velazquez' 
Philip  IV  wore  long  wigs  they  would  be 
seriously  depreciated  in  our  eyes.  Con- 
versely, if  Lely's  Baptist  May,  at  Windsor, 
had  his  own  hair  we  should  recognise  it  as 
the  peer  of  Van  Dyck's  finest  work.  Nay 
more,  I  maintain  that  if  Lely's  Unknown 
Man  in  Mrs.  Thompson's  possession, 
or  his  Sir  Robert  Long  in  the 
Brownlow  collection  (reproduced  in  Lely 
and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters,  L,  p.  172) 
wore  natural  hair,  we  should  rank  Lely 
among  the  profound  interpreters  of  life. 
That  this  is  not  the  advocate's  hired 
partiality  is  proved  by  the  reception  given 
to  Lely's  unwigged  Van  Helmont  when  it 
appeared  at  Christie's,  where,  coveted  by 
two  great  public  Galleries,  it  made  a 
record  price.  Nor  is  it  partisan  to  add 
that  this  Van  Helmont  is  neither  so  finely 


National  Gallery 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


Quality  of  the  Artist 


45 


painted  nor  so  deeply  interpretative  as 
those  portraits  I  have  named. 

Turning  from  these  men  portraits  to 
Lely's  child  portraits,  for  example,  the 
little  so-called  Princess  Mary  as  Diana,  at 
Hampton  Court,  and  others  in  the  Duke  of 
Devonshire's  and  Lord  Leconfield's  collec- 
tions, we  are  conscious  that  we  cannot  see 
them  fairly,  always  having  as  a  darkening 
glass  before  our  eyes  the  painter  of  the 
Windsor  Beauties  and  scores  of  tiresome 
languorous  women  and  heavily-wigged 
men.  But  if  we  saw  them  clearly,  with 
no  such  associations,  we  should  hail  them 
as  among  the  best  and  most  sympathetic 
child  portraits  of  the  XVIIth  Century.* 
Indeed,  before  we  found  more  adequate 
interpretations  of  childhood  we  should 
have  entered  the  territory  of  Reynolds 
and  Gainsborough,  the  first  exponents  of 
our  modern  view  of  children. 

In  this  preliminary  survey  of  Lely's 
relative  rank  we  have  left  his  women 

*  It  may  save  exceptionally  acute  critics  pain 
if  I  observe  that  I  am  dragging  in  neither 
Velazquez  nor  Titus  nor  the  Dulwich  Girl  at  a 
Window.  Rembrandt  and  Velazquez  are  hors 
concours. 


46 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


portraits  to  the  last :  because  in  the  first 
place  there  is  less  to  be  said  for  them,  and 
in  the  second  they  are,  we  suspect,  at  the 
root  of  the  disadvantage  under  which 
Lely's  reputation  labours.  For  not  only 
was  it  his  lot  to  portray  a  grossly  material 
series  of  women,  but  also  he  was  unen- 
dowed with  the  only  gifts  which  would 
make  a  success  of  such  a  series.  He  had 
neither  the  witty,  spirited  vision  of  a 
Latour  or  Perronneau,  the  mordant 
cynicism  of  a  Goya,  nor  the  acid  realism 
of  a  Degas.  Lely's  gifts  were  of  a  very 
different  sort.  But  before  we  define  those 
gifts  and  so  reach  a  fair  assessment  of 
Lely's  position  we  should  attempt  to  see 
quite  clearly  what  reason  there  is  for  the 
general  estimate  of  his  portraiture. 

Perhaps  it  is  more  difficult  to  survive  in 
portraiture  than  in  any  other  branch. 
For  portraits  eventually  rely  on  one  factor. 
The  interest  of  story,  the  freedom  and 
variety  of  landscape,  the  picked  effects  of 
colour  and  lighting  in  still  life,  the  skill 
and  intricacy  of  pattern  in  figure  com- 
positions are  not,  as  one  might  say,  in  the 
portrait   painter's   armoury.    He  may 


Quality  of  the  Artist  47 


introduce  fine  colour  and  striking  illumina- 
tion, he  may  paint  with  rich  science  and 
draw  with  fluent  mastery.  But  if  he  does 
not  reveal  the  inner  qualities  of  character 
and  thought,  and  the  authentic  stamp  of 
experience,  so  giving  others,  less  percep- 
tive, the  clue  to  understanding  life,  he  has 
no  chance  of  permanent  repute.  It  is 
equally  true  that  the  landscape  painter 
and  the  painter  of  story  must  have 
subtlety  and  profound  insight.  But  we 
naturally  are  more  exacting  as  regards 
insight  into  human  character  than  as 
regards  the  inner  content  of  pattern,  the 
qualities  of  atmosphere  and  light,  and  the 
continence  of  Scipio  or  the  sorrows  of 
Lot's  wife.  If  the  colour  be  good  and  the 
design  striking  we  are  inclined  to  take  for 
granted  the  inner  significance  of,  say, 
Titian's  Entombment.  But  though  the 
colour  be  equally  good  and  the  design  as 
adequate,  we  are  relatively  unenthusiastic 
over  his  portraits  of  young  women. 

As  the  years  pass  such  portraits  settle 
into  the  limbo  of  pictures  which  one  does 
not  notice,  though  the  subject  pictures 
may  yet  be  admired.    But  portraits  which 


48  Sir  Peter  Lely 


convince  us  of  the  actuality  of  the  experi- 
ence which  gave  this  and  that  character  to 
the  face,  portraits  in  which  the  embers  of 
vivid  life  still  seem  to  smoulder — these 
call  to  us  as  bearing  on  the  very  problem 
and  experiences  we  ourselves  share. 

If  we  look  over  the  accumulation  of 
portraits  that  have  come  down  to  us,  of 
what  kind  are  those  which  are  accounted 
masterpieces  ?  We  find  that  portraits 
live  in  inverse  proportion  to  their  pretti- 
ness  and  physical  appeal.  That  for  one 
vote  given  to  a  Palmesque  courtesan  ten 
will  be  given  to  a  shrewd  and  ugly  man : 
that  active  energy,  like  wit  and  liveliness, 
cunning  and  cruelty,  force  and  passion, 
and  above  all  knowledge,  continue  to 
interest  us,  where  languid  qualities,  such 
as  passive  sensuality,  dull  inoffensiveness 
and  placid  handsomeness  bore  us. 

In  his  place  in  time,  as  well  as  in  his 
limitations,  Lely  was  unfortunate.  Like 
most  things,  the  art  of  sexual  attraction  is 
subject  to  fashion.  The  vogue  in  Lely's 
day  was  drowsiness  and  melting  languors, 
which  were  so  perfected  by  the  finest 
experts  that  De  Grammont  was  not  sure, 


Quality  of  the  Artist  49 


with  some  of  the  most  successful  Beauties, 
whether  their  eyes  were  shut  or  open. 
That  the  men  of  those  days  preferred  this 
kind  of  provocation  sufficiently  exhibits 
their  crude  taste  in  amours.  But,  even 
admitting  this,  we  must  suspect  that, 
had  Lely  been  of  a  wittier  cast  and  of 
a  lighter  touch,  he  would  have  found 
qualities  of  character — spirit,  cleverness, 
devilry — -what  you  will,  to  interest  himself 
and  us.  For  him,  however,  character  too 
often  ended  with  physique.  Commissioned 
to  portray  a  particular  physical  aspect  of 
women,  and  the  men  who,  demanding  this 
aspect,  evoked  little  else,  he  did  exactly 
what  was  expected  of  him,  and  no  more. 
He  coincided  with  a  phase  of  English 
history  when  idealism  and  belief  were  in 
eclipse,  principle  and  honour  dead,  and 
an  enemy's  fleet  could  hold  the  Medway. 
Had  he  been  of  the  company  of  Rem- 
brandt and  Velazquez,  his  great  con- 
temporaries, he  would  have  probed  to  the 
stricken  soul  of  those  times  and  held  us 
spellbound  by  his  revelation.  Had  he 
been  a  Goya  he  would,  with  cynical, 
amused  eyes,  have  analysed  the  greed 


50  Sir  Peter  Lely 


and  grossness  which  inflamed  a  Barbara 
Villiers  and  a  Buckingham,  and  the  fear 
and  fraud  lurking  within  their  lack-lustre 
eyes.  Had  he  been  a  Degas  he  would 
have  recorded  with  disillusioned  absorp- 
tion the  evidence  of  physical  and  moral 
rot  which  his  cold  medical  scrutiny 
observed  in  the  nerves  and  bodies  of  a 
Brouncker  or  a  wanton  Shrewsbury. 

But  he  happened  to  be  plain  Lely,  to 
whom  Louise  de  Querouaille  was  no  more 
than  a  flaccidly  seductive  animal,  to 
whom  Barbara  Villiers  was  only  a  coarse 
virago,  a  hectoring  barmaid,  and 
Brouncker  but  a  mass  of  swollen  pomp. 
He  took  most  of  them  at  their  own 
valuation,  with  hardly  a  hint  that  he  ever 
formed  a  private  opinion.  This  method, 
as  we  have  suggested,  is  not  likely  to 
produce  permanently  interesting  por- 
traiture. Hardly  a  hint,  we  say,  because 
as  time  went  on  Lely  does  seem  to  have 
looked  with  his  own  eyes,  and,  looking,  to 
have  seen  that  however  the  window  was 
dressed,  all  was  not  well  within.  In  some 
of  his  later  portraits — for  example,  the 
Buckingham  in  the  National  Portrait 


Qua! ity  of  the  A  rtist  5 1 


Gallery — we  realise  that  an  uneasy  spirit 
resides  within  the  proud  and  coarsened 
face.  So  in  the  Windsor  Baptist  May, 
that  corrupt  "  court  pimp/'  foreboding 
and  regret  lurk  behind  a  cynical  and 
debonair  assurance. 

I  like  to  think  that  Lely,  in  the  heyday 
of  his  power,  turned  with  relief  from  the 
steamy,  amorous  air  of  the  bed-chambers 
and  backstairs  of  Hampton  Court  and 
Whitehall  to  the  sailors  of  the  Dutch 
wars.  As  we  con  the  history  of  those 
days  these  men  stand  out  from  its  pages 
as,  for  the  most  part,  single-minded  and 
efficient.  At  a  time  when  Government 
and  its  parasites  were  paralysed  by 
jobbery  and  belief  in  nothing,  these 
sailors,  despite  scandalous  and  heart- 
breaking neglect,  did  their  job  brilliantly 
and  thoroughly.  They  alone  in  that 
period  of  shame  and  muddle  exhibit 
discipline  and  fortitude.  In  them  alone, 
it  seems,  the  great  spirit  of  Elizabethan 
England  was  deposited.  And  though  at 
last  they  were  undone  by  the  blows  of 
Heaven  and  the  lusts  of  Charles — the 
Plague  and  Fire,  and  the  prices  demanded 


52  Sir  Peter  Lely 


by  the  Windsor  Beauties,  so  that,  while  a 
bankrupt  fleet  was  docked,  De  Ruyter 
came  up  the  Medway, — those  men  who 
fought  at  Lowestoft,  in  the  Straits  and 
off  the  North  Foreland  kept  our  honour 
bright.  Lely  painted  the  "  Flaggmen  " 
between  1665-1667,  twelve  in  all.  The 
portraits  hang  in  the  Painted  Hall  at 
Greenwich.  We  have  already  considered 
the  quality  of  their  technique.  As  for 
character,  they  give  us  a  new  reading  of 
the  Lely  who  at  the  same  time  was  busy 
with  the  Palace  parasites.  The  finest  of 
them  are  the  least  courtier-like.  The 
best,  I  think,  is  Jeremy  Smith  (reproduced 
in  Lely  and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters, 
I.,  p.  170).  In  him  is  revealed,  as  in  no 
other  portrait,  the  very  spirit  of  the 
Ironside  type  of  warrior  ;  the  resolution, 
the  potential  fanaticism,  the  unflinching 
severity  and  deep  humanity  of  a  Crom- 
well. It  is  true  that  Lely's  own  nation- 
ality and  his  invincible  habit  of  giving  all 
his  sitters  one  generalised  look  (a  fault 
recognised  by  his  contemporaries  and  one 
he  shared  with  Kneller)  come  between  us 
and  a  complete  realisation  of  the  true 


• 


Quality  of  the  Artist 


53 


Englishness  and  individuality  of  Jeremy 
Smith.  But  none  the  less,  if  we  discount 
that,  as  in  this  case  is  not  difficult,  we 
recognise  that  this  is  one  of  the  great 
portraits  of  the  seventeenth  century. 
For  sincere  interpretation,  to  say  nothing 
about  magnificent  technical  quality,  it 
comes,  on  the  roll  of  Dutch  masterpieces, 
next  Hals  and  Rembrandt. 

Enough  has  been  said  to  indicate  Lely's 
gifts  and  limitations,  and  to  account  for 
the  general  estimation  of  his  artistic  rank. 
We  have  seen  that  his  portraits  of 
courtesans  are  too  physical,  and  not 
dainty  or  lively  enough  for  our  taste.  W e 
have  made  allowance  for  the  peculiar 
drawbacks  of  the  moral  atmosphere  in 
which  he  painted,  but  we  have  also  let  it 
be  seen  that  we  do  not  regard  him  as  the 
victim  of  such  circumstances.  He  was 
not  a  seer  of  profound  imagination  denied 
his  chance  by  the  accident  of  uncongenial 
conditions.  He  was  not  a  square  peg 
unkindly  jammed  in  a  round  hole.  On 
the  contrary,  he  was  a  phlegmatic  and 
comfortable  soul,  pretty  content  with  his 
conditions.    Nor  was  he  aristocratic  in 


54 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


his  art,  as  were  Van  Dyck,  Dobson, 
Gainsborough  and  Reynolds.  So  we  find 
no  conspicuous  canvas  by  Lely  in  the 
gracious  gallery  of  English  ladies,  nor  in 
the  gallant  company  of  English  gentlemen. 
Dutch  he  was  and  therefore  out  of  touch 
with  so  subtle  and  incommunicable  a 
quality  as  the  nationality  of  another 
people  ;  he  was  artistically  bourgeois,  and 
so  precluded  from  instinctive  perception 
of  breeding. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  can  speak 
unreservedly  of  Lely  as  a  painter.  His 
only  peers  in  the  history  of  English 
painting  are  Van  Dyck  and  Kneller.  The 
former's  genius  was  more  sensitive  and 
quicker  ;  Lely  never  equalled  the  spon- 
taneous lightness  and  felicity  of  the  very 
best  passages  in  Van  Dyck's  most  ex- 
pressive handling  and  modelling.  His 
touch  is  more  massive  and  monumental. 
But  his  sense  of  paint  is  richer  and,  when 
it  comes  to  delicate  perfection  of  surface, 
he  could  make  paint  do  more  than  Van 
Dyck  could.  Compared  with  Kneller, 
Lely  is  larger  and  more  solid  in  his  feeling 
for  pigment,  just  as  in  temper  he  is 


Quality  of  the  Artist  55 


graver  and  more  thorough.  As  a  colourist 
he  is,  on  points,  as  they  say,  Van  Dyck's 
equal  and  Kneller's  superior. 

When  we  come  to  compare  him  with  the 
masters  of  a  century  later  we  feel  that,  if 
they  are  in  effect  more  seductive,  it  is  by 
qualities  which  are  inferior  to  Lely's.  The 
direct  simplicity  of  method  and  the  sheer 
value  of  draughtsmanship  for  which  Lely 
stands  were  obsolescent  in  Reynolds  and 
Gainsborough.  A  general  lowering  of 
stern  old  standards  was  in  process,  and 
various  substitutes  for  first  principles  of 
form-expression  were  being  tried.  No 
longer  was  it  fundamental  that  the  surface 
of  a  head  or  hand  should  be  inseparably 
related  to  the  bony  form  within.  The 
tests  insisted  on  by  Rubens  and  endorsed 
by  Van  Dyck  and  Lely  were  not  applied 
by  the  generation  which  succeeded 
Kneller.  Therefore,  inevitably,  drawing 
and  craftsmanship  decayed.  It  is  true 
that  other  interests  were  developed,  new 
qualities  expressed.  Reynolds,  Gains- 
borough and  Romney  painted  an  incom- 
parable series  of  English  aristocrats : 
fine-bred  ladies,  witty,  charming,  queenly  ; 


56 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


noble  and  gallant  youth ;  the  fire  and 
power  of  manhood  ;  the  wistfulness  of 
children,  the  dignity  and  wisdom  of  old 
age.  They,  indeed,  compiled  a  wonderful 
document  of  English  society  during  the 
second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century. 

The  astonishing  outburst  of  art  mani- 
fested in  these  painters  was  the  fruit  of 
the  calm  following  the  upheavals  of  the 
Stuart  period,  a  calm  in  which  English 
society  diverged  surprisingly  from  the 
society  of  Charles  IFs  and  James  IFs 
days.  The  blatant  sensuality  of  a 
courtesan  regime  was  incompatible  with 
the  decent  domesticity  of  George  III  ; 
the  nobles  had  had  time  to  acquire  the 
manners  of  gentlemen,  and  the  urbanity 
of  culture.  Their  very  clothes  signify  a 
mellower  civilisation.  A  return  from 
Reynolds'  Nelly  O'Brien  to  Lely's  Mrs. 
Middleton  is  a  journey  to  a  fabled  era 
from  a  world  akin  to  our  own.  If  Lely's 
women  seem  confined  to  a  dead  historical 
period,  Reynolds'  and  Gainsborough's 
would  not  look  much  out  of  place  in  the 
late  nineteenth  century,  however  strange 
they  might  appear  to-day. 


Quality  of  the  Artist  57 


But  in  accordance  with  a  natural  law 
this  great  expansion  was  not  achieved 
without  contraction  in  another  organ — 
the  organ  of  craftsmanship.  While 
painting  is  ancillary  to  drawing,  crafts- 
manship and  style  are  assured.  For  if  an 
artist  has  one  main  concern — the  in- 
terpretation of  structure — his  paint  is 
bound  to  be  simply  workmanlike  :  he  has 
no  spare  attention  for  empirical  but  sub- 
sidiary affairs.  His  paint  is  bound,  more- 
over, to  interpret  form,  and  so  have  a 
definite,  inherent  meaning.  But  once 
this  simplicity  and  organic  function  are 
lost  sight  of  and  paint  is  turned  to 
numerous  and  complicated  tasks,  crafts- 
manship decays.  Reynolds  is  one  of  the 
worst  craftsmen  any  school  produced,  not 
excepting  Wilkie  and  Turner,  simply 
because,  impatient  of  the  old  view  that 
painting  was  but  the  handmaiden  of 
drawing,  he,  like  any  alchemist,  was 
lured  in  the  pursuit  of  the  unattain- 
able. Thus  we  have  the  common  spec- 
tacle of  faded  Reynolds,  of  cracked 
and  blistered  Reynolds,  of  beautifully 
stippled  Reynolds.    But  never  have  I 


58 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


seen  a  Lely  suffering  from  congenital 
disease. 

From  this  change  in  attitude  on  the  part 
of  English  eighteenth-century  painters 
come  most  of  our  present  disabilities  of 
art.  The  transference  of  interest  from 
fundamental  structure  to  surface  effects 
cost  us  also  our  tradition  of  draughtsman- 
ship. This  is  not  the  place  for  any 
survey  of  the  creeping  paralysis  which 
spread  over  English  painting,  which 
could  not  be  arrested  by  the  isolated 
phenomenon  of  a  Constable  or  Cotman, 
and  which  eventually  reduced  our  art  to 
the  average  standard  of  the  Royal 
Academy  :  a  plight  for  which  we  are  not 
consoled  by  the  knowledge  that  all 
modern  official  art  in  every  country  is 
equally  remote  from  true  drawing  and 
craftsmanship.  But  it  may  be  more 
relevant  to  remark  that  the  educational 
value  of  Lely  has  not  yet  been  discovered. 
One  explanation  is  that  his  best  work  at 
Greenwich  and  Hampton  Court  is  beyond 
the  reach  of  students  and  probably  out- 
side the  ken  of  art  school  professors.  Be 
that  as  it  may,  his  legacy  of  a  perfect 


Quality  of  the  Artist  59 


technique  lies  unclaimed,  a  technique 
of  lucid  order,  of  severely  disciplined 
expressiveness  and  faultless  constitution. 
The  decay  of  painting  which  began  with 
Reynolds  has  fallaciously  been  identified 
with  a  deterioration  of  mental  taste. 
But  in  origin  it  was  no  more  than  a  mis- 
conception of  the  function  of  painting. 
It  is  clear  that,  had  Reynolds  with  no 
other  change  or  diminution  been  as  fine 
and  disciplined  a  technician  as  Lely,  he 
would  be  a  greater  artist.  In  the  same 
way  we  are  now  told  that  revolt  from 
tradition  and  resort  to  the  technique  of  a 
child  of  four  or  a  bargee  will  cure  all  ills. 
But  it  is  not  so  simple  as  that.  The 
dearth  of  imagination,  perception  and 
deep  insight  cannot  be  remedied  by  any 
recipe.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  no  great 
thought  is  adequately  realised  unless  it  be 
expressed  by  lucid,  beautiful  and  durable 
technique.  Nature  alone  apparently  can 
guarantee  great  qualities  of  mind  and 
emotion,  and  in  Lely's  case  she  was  not 
generous.  But  what  mortal  could  do  to 
discipline  his  hand  and  beautifully  to 
express  what  was  in  him,  Lely  did. 

F 


APPENDIX  I 


Pictures  by  Lely  in  English  Galleries 
open  to  the  public 

National  Gallery. 

Van  Helmont  c.  1665 

National  Portrait  Gallery. 

George    Villiers,     Second     Duke  of 

Buckingham  (279) 
Elizabeth  Hamilton,  Comtesse  de 

Grammont  (509) 
Eleanor  Gwyn  (36) 
Sir  Edward  Nicholas  (1519) 
Roger  North  (766) 
Prince  Rupert  (608) 
Gilbert  Sheldon,  D.D.  (1837) 
Anna   Maria   Brudenell,    Countess  of 

Shrewsbury  (280) 
Sir  William  Temple,  Bart.  (152) 
William  Wycherley  (880) 

On  Loan  to  the  National  Gallery. 
Simon  Patrick,  D.D.  (1500) 

Tate  Gallery. 

Portrait  of  a  Girl  (10 16) 

Hampton  Court. 
Duchess  of  York 
Frances,  Duchess  of  Richmond 
Lady  Bellasis 

Comtesse  de  Grammont  {signed) 


c.  1662 


1662 
1664 
c.  1663 
c.  1663-4 


61 


Sir  Peter  Lely 


Henrietta,  Countess  of  Rochester  c.  1663 

Mrs.  Jane  Middleton  c.  1663 

Lady  Whitmore  c.  1663 
Elizabeth,  Countess  of  Northumberland  c.  1663 

Countess  of  Falmouth  c.  1664 

Anne,  Countess  of  Sunderland  c.  1664 

Lady  Denham  c.  1664 

Barbara,  Duchess  of  Cleveland,  as 

Bellona  c.  1665 

Princess  Mary  or  Jane  Kellaway  c.  1668 
Two  Self  Portraits 


Greenwich  Hospital. 

Admiral  Sir  John  Harman  (2) 

Sir  John  Lawson  (3) 

Admiral  Sir  Jeremy  Smith  (11) 

Sir  William  Penn  (12) 

George  Monck,  Duke  of  Albe- 
marle (13) 

Admiral  Sir  George  Ayscue  (14) 

Admiral  Sir  Thomas  Allen  (15) 

Sir  Thomas  Tyddiman  (19) 

Sir  Christopher  Mings  (40) 

Admiral  Edward  Montagu,  Earl 
of  Sandwich  (41) 

Sir  Joseph  Jordan  (114) 

Sir  William  Berkeley  (116) 

Cambridge  (Fitzwilliam  Museum) 
Lady  Eleanor  Holies  {reputed  Lely) 

Manchester  (City  Art  Gallery). 
Lady  Whitmore 

Windsor  Castle. 

Prince  Rupert  c.  1665 

Baptist  May  c.  1677 

Dulwich. 

Abraham  Cowley  as  a  Youth  (563) 
Nymphs  at  a  Fountain  (555) 


c.  1665 
to 

>  1667 


Appendix  63 


Portraits   Painted   in   Lely's  Studio,  or 
Copies  after  Lely,   in  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery. 

George  Monck,  Duke  of  Albemarle  (423) 
Henry  Bennet,  Earl  of  Arlington  (1853) 
William,  Second  Viscount  Brouncker  (1567) 
Henry,  Third  Viscount  Brouncker  (1590) 
Barbara  Villiers,  Duchess  of  Cleveland  (387) 
Thomas,  First  Baron  Clifford  of  Chudleigh  (204) 
Sir  William  Compton.    (By  H.  Paert  after  Lely) 

(1522) 
Mary  Davis  (253) 
Sir  John  Harman  (14 19) 
Sir  Peter  Lely  (951) 

Edward  Montagu,  Second  Earl  of  Manchester 
(1838) 

James  Scott,  Duke  of  Monmouth  and  Buccleuch 

(556) 

James  Butler,  First  Duke  of  Ormonde  (370) 
Thomas  Butler,  First  Earl  of  Ossory  (371) 
Edward  Montagu,  First  Earl  of  Sandwich  (609) 
Elizabeth  Percy,  Duchess  of  Somerset  (1753) 
Thomas  Wriotriesley,  Fourth  Earl  of  Southampton 
(68i) 

James  Ussher,  D.D.  (574) 

Sir  Joseph  Williamson  (1100) 

Anne  Hyde,  Duchess  of  York  (241) 

Henry  Howard,  Sixth  Duke  of  Norfolk  (613) 

Sir  Paul  Rycaut  (1874) 

Thomas  Osborne,  First  Duke  of  Leeds  (1472) 


APPENDIX  II 


List  of  Works  on  the  Life  and  Art  of 
Sir  Peter  Lely 

Walpole's  Anecdotes,  1828,  iii,  pp.  26-44. 

D.N.B.,  xxxiii,  p.  19. 

Bryan's  Diet.  Painters,  iii,  p.  205. 

Encyclop.  Brit.,  Eleventh  Edn.,  xvi,  p.  408. 

Great  Britain  and  Ireland,  by  Sir  W.  Armstrong 

(Ars  Una  Series),  pp.  170-174. 
Lely  and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters,  by  C.  H. 

Collins  Baker. 
Wurzbach.     Niederl£ndisches  Kiinstlerlexikon, 

81  PP-  2 4-26. 


SIR  GODFREY  KNELLER 


Sir  GODFREY  KNELLER 


CHAPTER  I 


Biographical  and  Personal 

Godfrey  Kneller  or  Kniller  was  the 
third  son  of  Zacharias  Kneller,  of  Lubeck, 
in  North  Germany,  and  Lucia  Beuten, 
his  wife.  This  Zacharias  was  the  son  of 
"  the  surveyor-general  of  mines  and 
inspector  of  Count  Mansfeldt's  revenues  n 
(Walpole)  and  is  said  to  have  been  an 
architect  by  Walpole,  and  a  portrait 
painter  by  Cockayne.*  His  three  sons 
were  Johann  Zacharias,  a  painter,  who 
accompanied  our  Godfrey  to  England, 
helped  him  in  his  study,  painted  good 
still  life,  and  died  in  1702  ;  Andrew  "  of 
Hambrough,  Gent "  who,  mentioned  in 
Godfrey's  will,  probably  survived  him  ; 
and  Godfrey,  born  8th  August  1646,  at 
Lubeck — (Walpole  suggests  about  1648). 
Intended  for  a  soldier,  the  lad  studied 

*  The  Complete  Baronetage  by  G.  E.  C. 

67 


68  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 

mathematics  and  engineering  at  Leiden, 
but  in  1668,  according  to  Cockayne, 
applied  himself  to  Art.  According  to 
R.  Buckeridge*  he  was  sent  to  study  in 
Amsterdam.  Bol  is  named  as  his  master, 
and  Vertue  was  told  in  1713  by  Byng, 
Kneller' s  studio  assistant,  that  Rem- 
brandt, too,  had  a  hand  in  his  training. 
Lest  our  young  man  should  not  have  had 
every  possible  chance,  Walpole  throws  in 
Hals  as  well.  In  1668  Bol  was  painting 
one  of  his  latest  dated  works,  The 
Governesses  of  the  Leper  House,  in  Amster- 
dam ;  Hals  had  died  in  Haarlem  in  1666 
and  Rembrandt  died  in  October,  1669; 
so  that,  whatever  Kneller  got  from  Bol,  it 
seems  unlikely  that  he  got  much  from 
Hals  or  Rembrandt.  Byng,  it  should  be 
noted,  told  Vertue  that  Kneller  was  about 
seventeen  when  he  took  to  art,  which 
would  give  us  1663  for  the  date,  taking 
1646  as  the  year  of  Kneller's  birth.  But 
I  think  Byng  accepted  about  1648,  which 
brings  us  up  to  1665  or  so.  However 
that  may  be,  we  must  admit  that  if  Byng, 

*  His  edn.  of  R.  de  Pile's  The  Art  of  Painting, 
with  Kneller's  life  inserted,  1750. 


Biographical  and  Personal  69 

who  was  Kneller's  journeyman  and  one  of 
his  legatees,  told  Vertue  in  Kneller's  life- 
time that  Rembrandt  had  given  his 
master  some  instruction,  there  probably 
was  some  truth  in  the  statement.  In 
1713  Rembrandt  had  not  the  glamour  he 
now  has,  and  Kneller  would  not  have 
gained  anything  by  inventing  the  story. 
At  the  same  time  we  must  also  concede 
that  whatever  interest  the  rumour  has  is 
sentimental.  For,  alas,  Kneller's  known 
work  does  not  suggest  that  the  great 
Master  imparted  to  him  any  considerable 
mysteries. 

Indeed,  if  we  take  Buckeridge's  view,  it 
seems  that  Master  Godfrey  was  dis- 
satisfied with  the  principles  of  teaching  he 
found  in  Amsterdam.  "  Not  contented 
with  that  gusto  of  painting,  where 
exact  design  and  true  proportions  were 
wanting,  he  went  to  Italy,"  arriving,  so 
Walpole  says,  in  1672,  though  this  is 
probably  conjectural.  There  he  is  said 
to  have  studied  under  Maratti  and 
Signor  Bernini,  working  in  Rome  and 
Naples  at  history  painting,  architecture 
and  anatomy.    Next  he  went  to  Venice, 


70  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


where  Walpole  asserts  he  stayed  some 
time,  employed  by  "  some  of  the  first 
families  and  where  he  drew  Cardinal 
Bassadona."  Marshall  Smith*  names 
some  of  Kneller's  Venetian  patrons  and 
numerous  others  for  whom,  and  for  the 
Cardinal,  he  painted  portraits  and  histori- 
cal pieces,  the  fruit  of  his  study  of  Raphael 
and  Titian.  I  have  no  idea  where  these 
Venetian  performances  are  now. 

On  Byng's  authority  we  know  that 
Kneller  came  to  England  in  1674,  ap- 
parently intending  to  make  a  short  stay 
only,  and  then  to  return  to  Venice, 
"  where  he  had  gained  a  great  repute.' ' 
Presumably  he  came  on  the  invitation  of 
a  fellow  countryman,  one  Banks,  a 
Hamburg  merchant,  with  whom  he 
lodged,  and  for  whom  he  painted  various 
family  portraits.  These  seem  to  have 
made  something  of  a  stir,  attracting  the 
patronage  of  a  Mr.  Vernon,  secretary  to 
the  Duke  of  Monmouth.  This  Mr.  Vernon 
may  be  described  as  the  bridge  over  which 
Kneller  passed  from  nomadic  obscurity  to 

*  The  Art  of  Painting,  2nd  edn.  1693,  as  quoted 
by  Vertue,  Add.  MSS.  23069. 


Biographical  and  Personal  71 

the  settled  splendour  of  Sir  Godfrey 
Kneller,  Bart.  For  Mr.  Vernon  intro- 
duced the  artist  to  Monmouth,  who 
passed  him  on  to  his  royal  father.  Inci- 
dentally this  Mr.  Vernon  had  installed 
Kneller  in  a  house,  after  he  had  been  one 
year  with  Banks — presumably  in  1675. 

Charles  IPs  reception  of  the  rising  star 
is  well  known.  Previously  engaged  to 
Lely,  and  with  no  time  to  spare  for  smaller 
fry,  he  permitted  Kneller  to  paint  him  as 
he  sat  to  Sir  Peter.  The  story  goes  that 
while  the  latter,  according  to  his  custom, 
was  building  up  the  monochrome  under- 
painting  of  his  portrait,  Godfrey  finished 
his,  slap-dash ;  a  performance  which 
evoked  his  competitor's  tribute  and,  as 
Walpole  puts  it,  "  fixed  Kneller  here. 
The  series  of  his  portraits  prove  the  con- 
tinuance of  his  reputation."  Byng 
suggests  that  this  historic  sitting  took 
place  about  1678,  four  years  after 
Kneller' s  arrival.  As  we  shall  see  later, 
specimens  of  his  brush  prior  to  1680  are 
not  common  ;  and  but  for  Byng's  gossip 
and  a  note  in  Vertue's  MSS.  that  Kneller 
"  lived  one  year  in  York  Buildings,  and 


72 


Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


four  in  Durham  Yard,"  we  have  little 
evidence  on  his  movements.  Possibly  he 
revisited  Italy,  as  is  implied  by  a  note  in 
Vertue,  that  the  writer  saw  at  Whitton, 
"  the  late  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller's  house,  a 
picture  of  the  Roman  Amphitheatre 
dated  1677  and  signed  G.  Kneller."  But 
neither  Buckeridge  nor  Byng  mentions  a 
return  to  Italy. 

Byng's  narrative  proceeds  from  the 
point  where  Kneller  won  royal  favour.  It 
seems  that  the  nobles  and  their  ladies  lent 
their  countenance  to  the  new  favourite, 
who  thus  was  firmly  in  the  saddle  when 
in  1680  his  only  serious  rival,  Lely,  died. 
Expanding  business,  we  gather,  necessi- 
tated a  larger  establishment,  so  that 
Kneller  moved  to  Lely's  old  pitch  in  the 
Piazza,  Co  vent  Garden.  Byng  thought 
he  settled  there  about  1682  ;  but  perhaps 
it  was  earlier,  even  immediately  after 
Lely's  death.  For,  if  Kneller  arrived  in 
London  in  1674,  stayed  with  Mr.  Banks 
till  the  end  of  1675,  then  was  four  years 
in  Durham  Yard,  whence  he  moved  to  the 
Piazza,  that  would  give  us  c.  1680.  He 
remained  there,  Byng  says,  twenty-one 


Biographical  and  Personal  73 

years,  on  lease,  and  then  bought  a  house 
in  Great  Queen  Street,  where  he  died. 

The  rest  of  his  career  was  that  of  an  over- 
worked and  not  too  conscientious  court 
painter.  Evelyn  mentions  him  in  1685 
as  "  the  famous  Mr.  Kneller  ;  '  ■  Walpole 
says,  rather  viciously,  that  "  where  he 
offered  one  picture  to  fame,  he  sacrificed 
twenty  to  lucre  ;  "  he  was  patronised  by 
five  monarchs  at  home,  and  was  sent  to 
France  in  1684  to  paint  Louis  XIV. 
Apparently  he  was  away  some  time,  for 
on  his  return,  Walpole  suggests,  he  found 
Charles  had  died  (1685),  and  so  had  to 
transfer  his  services  to  James  II.  It  is 
said  that  while  Kneller  was  painting  him 
James  received  the  news  that  William  of 
Orange  was  landed  in  Torbay.  This  was 
in  November,  1688.  Possibly  Kneller  had 
visited  France  again  in  1687,  when  he 
painted  a  portrait  of  Louise,  Duchess  of 
Portsmouth,  who  is  generally  assumed  to 
have  settled  abroad  after  Charles  IPs 
death. 

For  William  and  Mary  Kneller  pro- 
duced his  series  of  so-called  Hampton 
Court  Beauties  which  was  to  rival  Lely's 


74 


Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


Windsor  Beauties*  In  consequence  he 
was  knighted,  in  1692,  and  presented  with 
a  gold  medal  and  chain.  Walpole  says 
that  William  commissioned  him  to  paint 
Peter  the  Great,  presumably  in  1697-8, 
and  Buckeridge  informs  us  that  he  was 
sent,  about  the  same  time,  to  Brussels  to 
paint  the  Elector  of  Bavaria. 

William's  death  in  1702  gave  Sir  Godfrey 
a  new  royal  patron  ;  his  portraits  of  Queen 
Anne  are  numerous.  In  1703-4  he  painted 
Charles  VI,  Roman  Emperor,  "  so  poor  a 
performance  that  one  would  think  he  felt 
the  fall  from  Peter  to  Charles  "  as  Walpole 
politically  remarks.  A  far  finer  series  of 
portraits  than  the  Hampton  Court 
Beauties  is  Kneller' s  contribution  to  the 
Admiral  series,  in  the  Painted  Hall,  at 
Greenwich.  These  belong  to  the  early 
years  of  the  new  century.  Then,  too, 
were  commenced  his  famous  Kit  Kat 
portraits,  which  lasted  him  virtually  to 
the  end  of  his  career.  This  club,  as 
Walpole  says,  "  of  the  patriots  that  saved 


*  Kneller's  series  was  housed  at  Hampton 
Court  and  Lely's  at  Windsor.  Now  both  hang 
at  Hampton  Court. 


Biographical  and  Personal  75 

Britain/'  occasioned  forty-three  half- 
length  portraits  by  Sir  Godfrey,  some  in 
his  finest  style,  and  christened  a  particular 
size  of  canvas  (36  by  28  in.)  a  Kit  Kat. 
The  explanation  of  the  name  is  that  the 
Club  met  at  a  pie-house  whose  keeper's 
name  was  Christopher  Katling.  Walpole 
adds,  "  The  Collection  of  portraits  called 
'  The  Kit-Cat  Club  '  is  that  to  which  Sir 
Godfrey  owes  a  great  celebrity.  The 
portraits  were  painted  for  Jacob  Tonson, 
the  bookseller,  who  was  at  that  time  the 
Secretary  of  the  Club,  and  by  him  placed 
in  a  room,  which  he  had  built  at  Barn 
Elms,  Surrey,  to  receive  them,  and  in 
which  the  meetings  of  the  members  were 
held.  The  Club  was  established  in  1703, 
and  consisted  of  thirty-nine  of  the  most 
distinguished  Whigs.  As  they  were  all  of 
them  his  patrons  and  friends,  Kneller,  no 
longer  biassed  merely  by  venal  considera- 
tions, was  proud  to  exert  the  happiest 
efforts  of  his  pencil."  In  Walpole' s  day 
they  were  in  the  possession  of  Mr.  Baker, 
of  Hill  Street,  Berkeley  Square.  Now 
they  are  at  Bayfordbury  in  the  same 
family. 

G 


76  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


Another  fashionable  Club  with  which 
Kneller  was  connected  in  1706  was  the 
Social  Club.  The  following  circular, 
announcing  the  revival  of  this  institution, 
shows  us  the  kind  of  company  our 
painter  kept. 

"  The  Honble.  Order  of  Little  Bedlam 
and  the  list  of  Members  and  their  names 
in  the  Club  : — 

The  Great  Master,  John,  Earl  of  Exeter 


William,  Duke  of  Devonshire  Leopard 


In  fact,  like  Van  Dyck  and  Lely  before 
him,  and  Reynolds  afterwards,  Kneller 
cut  a  conspicuous  social  figure,  probably 
to  his  art's  cost.  He  reached  a  higher 
rung  than  either  of  his  predecessors, 
attaining  a  baronetcy,  24  May,  1715. 
Pope,  Steele,  Addison,  Dryden,  Prior  and 
Tickell  all  addressed  specimens  of  flattery 
to  him.  Small  wonder,  reflects  Walpole, 
that  one  so  pandered  to  should  have  been 
vain.    Instances  of  this  vanity,  fabulous 


Lyon 


Earl  of  Denbighe 

Ant.  Verrio 

Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


Tyger 

Porcupine 

Vnicorne." 


Biographical  and  Personal  77 

or  actual,  are  given  in  various  anecdotes 
of  this  kidney.  "  Kneller  said  to  a  low 
fellow  whom  he  overheard  cursing  him- 
self :  '  God  damn  you  ?  God  may  damn 
the  Duke  of  Marlborough  and  perhaps 
Sir  Godfrey  Kneller  ;  but  do  you  think  he 
will  take  that  trouble  with  you  ?  '  "  And 
again,  when  his  tailor  proposed  that 
Kneller  should  take  his  son  for  an  appren- 
tice, the  infatuated  master  replied :  "  Dost 
thou  think,  man,  I  can  make  thy  son  a 
painter  ?  No  ;  God  Almighty  only  makes 
painters/'  Walpole  cites  Kneller's  para- 
phrase of  a  particular  text  of  scripture, 
"  In  my  father's  house  are  many  man- 
sions "  ;  which  Sir  Godfrey  interpreted 
thus  :  "  At  the  day  of  judgment,"  said  he, 
"  God  will  examine  mankind  on  their 
different  professions  :  to  one  he  will  say, 
Of  what  sect  was  you  ?  I  was  a  Papist — 
Go  you  there.  What  was  you  ?  A 
Protestant — Go  you  there.  And  you  ? 
— A  Turk — Go  you  there.  And  you,  Sir 
Godfrey  ?  I  was  of  no  sect — then  God 
will  say,  Sir  Godfrey,  chuse  your  place." 

Pope,  indeed,  laid  a  wager  that  there 
was  no  flattery  so  gross  but  Kneller  would 


j8  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


swallow.  To  prove  it,  Pope  said  to  him 
as  he  was  painting,  "  Sir  Godfrey,  I 
believe  if  God  Almighty  had  had  your 
assistance,  the  world  would  have  been 
formed  more  perfect."  "  'Fore  God,  sir," 
replied  Kneller,  "  I  believe  so." 

Two  more  anecdotes  from  Walpole  are 
happier.  Kneller  had  a  fine  garden  to  his 
Great  Queen  Street  house,  to  which, 
through  a  door  in  the  party  wall,  he 
allowed  his  nephew,  Dr.  Ratcliffe,  access. 
But  when  he  found  that  the  doctor's 
servants  stole  his  flowers  he  sent  word 
to  their  master  that  he  must  shut  the 
door.  Ratcliffe  replied  peevishly,  "  Tell 
him  he  may  do  anything  with  it  but 
paint  it."  "  And  I,"  answered  Sir 
Godfrey,  "  can  take  anything  from  him 
but  physic." 

Sir  Godfrey  at  Whitton  acted  as  Justice 
of  Peace,  and  was  so  much  more  swayed 
by  Equity  than  Law,  that  his  judgments, 
accompanied  with  humour,  have  said  to 
have  occasioned  those  lines  by  Pope : 

I  think  Sir  Godfrey  should  decide  the  suit, 
Who  sent  the  Thief  (that  stole  the  cash)  away. 
And  punish'd  him  thai;  put  it  in  his  way. 


Biographical  and  Personal  79 

This  alluded  to  his  dismissing  a  soldier 
who  had  stolen  a  joint  of  meat,  and 
accused  the  butcher  of  having  tempted 
him  by  it.  Whenever  Sir  Godfrey  was 
applied  to,  to  determine  what  parish  a 
poor  man  belonged  to,  he  always  inquired 
which  parish  was  the  richer,  and  settled 
the  poor  man  there  ;  nor  would  he  ever 
sign  a  warrant  to  distrain  the  goods  of  a 
poor  man,  who  could  not  pay  a  tax. 
These  instances  showed  the  goodness  of 
his  heart ;  others,  even  in  his  capacity  of 
justice,  his  peculiar  turn.  A  handsome 
young  woman  came  before  him  to  swear 
a  rape  ;  struck  with  her  beauty,  he  con- 
tinued examining  her,  as  he  sat  painting, 
till  he  had  taken  her  likeness.  If  he  dis- 
liked interruption,  he  would  not  be 
interrupted.  Seeing  a  constable  coming 
to  him  at  the  head  of  a  mob,  he  called  to 
him,  without  inquiring  into  the  affair : 
"  Mr.  Constable,  you  see  that  turning  ; 
go  that  way,  and  you  will  find  an  ale- 
house, the  sign  of  the  King's  Head- 
go,  and  make  it  up." 

"  These  anecdotes/'  says  Walpole, 
with  several  others,  in  which  he  dis- 


8o  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


played  much  genuine  and  characteristic 
wit,  are  given  in  the  '  Letters  of  High- 
more/  the  painter,  published  in  the 
Gent.  Mag.  In  the  Aubrey  MSS., 
published  in  three  vols.,  8vo.  1813,  is  a 
note  of  a  conversation  which  Sir  Godfrey 
held  with  some  gentlemen  at  Oxford, 
relative  to  the  identity  of  a  personage, 
formerly  of  great  political  importance,  the 
disinherited  son  of  James  II.  Some 
doubts  having  been  expressed,  he  ex- 
claimed with  warmth  :  '  His  father  and 
mother  have  sate  to  me  about  thirty-six 
times  apiece,  and  I  know  every  line  and 
bit  of  their  faces.  Mine  Gott  !  I  could 
paint  King  James  now,  by  memory.  I 
say,  the  child  is  so  like  both  that  there  is 
not  a  feature  in  his  face,  but  what  belongs 
either  to  father  or  mother,  this  I  am  sure 
of,  and  can  not  be  mistaken — nay  the 
nails  of  his  fingers  are  his  mother's,  the 
Queen  that  was.  Doctor  !  you  may  be 
out  in  your  letters,  but  I  cannot  be  out 
in  my  lines/  " 

Of  Kneller' s  private  life  we  hear  from 
Walpole  that  he  seduced  a  Quaker's  wife 
(apparently  named  Voss,  whom  he  painted 


Biographical  and  Personal  81 

with  her  child,  as  we  know  from  Smith's 
print),  bought  her  from  the  Quaker,  and 
had  a  daughter  by  her  who  figures  as  the 
St.  Agnes  with  a  Lamb  in  the  portrait  also 
engraved  by  Smith.  Subsequently,  23 
January,  1703-4,  at  St.  Brides',  he 
married  Susannah  Cawley,  daughter  of 
the  parson  at  Henley.  She  outlived  him, 
but  apparently  gave  him  no  children.  At 
any  rate  he  died  with  no  legitimate 
surviving  offspring. 

Walpole  states,  no  doubt  on  information 
derived  from  Byng,  that  Kneller's  prices 
were  15  guineas  for  a  head,  20  if  one  hand 
was  included,  30  for  a  half-length,  and  60 
for  a  full  length.  Some  indication  of  his 
industry  is  given  by  Walpole' s  estimate 
that  he  lost  £20,000  in  the  South  Sea 
Bubble,  and  yet  left  an  estate  of  £2,000 
per  annum  to  his  widow  and  others.  His 
will  shows  that  his  daughter  Agnes'  son, 
Godfrey  Huckle,  was  a  legatee,  on  con- 
dition that  he  took  the  name  of  Kneller ; 
other  beneficiaries  were  the  daughters  of 
his  brother,  Andrew  of  Hamburg,  and  our 
friend  Byng.  His  house  property  was 
Whitton  House,  Twickenham,  and  his 


82  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


houses  in  Great  Queen  Street,  and  Wild 
Street ;  he  also  had  property  in  Great 
Square,  at  "  Rygate,  Surry/'  His  will 
shows  us  that  Byng  was  to  complete 
portraits  left  unfinished,  in  partnership 
with  Lady  Kneller,  to  whom  all  portraits, 
finished  or  not,  were  left.  By  the  will 
Byng  is  not  obliged  to  perfect  the 
imperfect  further  than  he  and  Lady 
Kneller  can  agree  ;  but  in  a  codicil,  made 
just  before  the  master  died,  Byng  is 
required,  under  penalties,  to  be  more 
entirely  subservient  to  the  prospective 
widow.  We  note  that  no  finished  portrait, 
undelivered  at  Kneller's  death,  is  to  go 
out  for  less  than  the  regular  price,  and 
that  for  the  unfinished  which  shall  be 
completed  by  or  under  Byng,  he  shall  get 
a  half  share  of  the  price.  We  can  readily 
suppose  that,  if  this  clause  was  generally 
known,  the  portraits  which  came  home 
after  Sir  Godfrey's  death  must  have  been 
eyed  a  little  dubiously. 

Kneller  fell  ill  in  1722,  but  snatched  a 
respite  from  Dr.  Mead.  "  The  humour, 
however,  fell  on  his  left  arm,  and  it  was 
opened."    His  will  is  dated  27  April- 


Biographical  and  Personal  83 

14  October,  1723  ;  he  died  in  his  Great 
Queen  Street  house  five  days  later  and, 
after  lying  in  state,  was  buried  on 
November  7th  in  his  garden  at  Whitton, 
Twickenham.  Lady  Kneller  died  at 
Twickenham  in  1729. 


CHAPTER  II 


Training  and  Association  with 
Artists 

Kneller,  as  we  have  seen,  came  on  the 
scene  in  London  about  1674-75.  As  Lely 
had  found  a  successful  painter  in 
possession  when  he  arrived,  so  Kneller 
found  Lely  at  the  flood  of  his  powers  and 
practice.  But,  whereas  Lely  had  few 
competitors,  Kneller  had  several,  who,  if 
they  made  no  serious  inroad  into  Sir 
Peter's  practice,  pretty  well  divided 
among  themselves  the  lesser  but  still 
lucrative  sources  of  patronage.  Some 
we  have  already  mentioned  with  reference 
to  Lely — the  Dutchmen  who  came  over  to 
England  at  the  Restoration  and  a  few 
native  artists.  Among  the  former  were 
Jacob  Huysmans,  who  lived  till  1696, 
Gerard  Soest,  who  died  in  1681,  and  Lely's 
pupil  Willem  Wissing,  who  died  young  in 

85 


86 


Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


1687.  Other  foreigners  whom  we  have 
not  mentioned  and  do  not  propose  to 
dwell  on  were  Johann  Baptist  Closterman, 
who  came  here  in  1681,  throve,  and  died 
in  171 1  ;  a  pair  of  Kersebooms,  Frederick 
and  Johann,  who  were  working  in  Eng- 
land in  the  i68o's ;  and  Simon  Dubois, 
who  practised  here  from  about  1685-1708. 
Others  there  were  who  need  not  keep  us. 
Of  all  these  the  first  three  must  have 
seemed  serious  rivals  to  the  newcomer 
Kneller.  For  between  them  they  catered 
for  the  nobles,  the  court  ladies  and  the 
professional  classes. 

Kneller  also  had  to  reckon  with  the 
native  painters  he  found  here  ;  Michael 
Wright,  whom  we  have  noted  as  one  of 
Lely's  rivals,  and  who  died  in  1700  ; 
John  Greenhill,  who  by  careless  living 
stupidly  cut  off  a  career  of  brilliant 
promise ;  John  Riley,  Soest's  pupil, 
whose  practice  extended  from  about  1670- 
1691,  and  Mary  Beale,  who  had  a  large 
business  from  about  1670  till  her  death 
in  1697.  Wright  was  in  Evelyn's  phrase 
"  the  famous  painter,"  and  he  signed  him- 
self    "  Pictor     regius."    He  painted 


Training  and  Association  87 

Charles  II,  all  the  judges  of  his  time,  and 
had  what  is  called  a  sound  connection 
with  the  best  families.  If  he  did  not 
paint  Hampton  Court  Beauties,  he  painted, 
very  agreeably,  the  ladies  of  a  quieter  and 
better  set.  Greenhill,  who  died  in  1676, 
two  years  after  Kneller  came,  seems  to 
have  been  consolidating  a  good  practice 
among  the  squire  and  noble  class.  Riley, 
who  painted  both  Charles  II  and 
James  II,  and  many  of  the  greatest 
nobles,  ran,  as  one  might  say,  a  side-line  of 
bourgeoisie  business,  painting  city  mag- 
nates, divines,  and  other  professional 
people.  He  had  Closterman  for  partner, 
at  one  period,  not  altogether  to  the  advan- 
tage of  his  output.  Lastly  Kneller  had  to 
reckon  with  Mary  Beale,  that  assiduous 
student  of  Lely.  She  had  a  fair  clientele 
among  the  aristocracy,  and  rather 
specialised  in  superior  clergy. 

This  competition,  then,  had  to  be  faced 
when  after  his  casual  visit  to  Mr.  Banks, 
in  1674,  Kneller  decided  to  remain  in 
London.  In  his  favour,  perhaps,  was  his 
foreign  experience,  his  ability  to  roll  off 
his  tongue  such  names  as  Titian  and 


88 


Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


Raphael,  Marat ti  and  Rembrandt.  Also, 
he  had  the  luck  of  good  introductions, 
which,  as  we  sadly  know,  will  get  royal 
commissions  for  worse  painters  than 
Kneller.  But  yet  more  valuable  assets 
were,  I  suspect,  a  pushing  confidence,  a 
skilled  address,  and  the  priceless  gift  of 
knowing  how  to  invest  success  at  com- 
pound interest.  In  thus  looking  rather 
low  for  the  cause  of  Kneller' s  success, 
instead  of  lifting  our  eyes  to  the  plane  of 
artistic  superiority  over  his  competitors, 
we  may  seem  to  be  doing  his  attainment 
as  an  artist,  before  1680,  less  than  justice. 
But  in  defence  I  will  plead  that  so  much 
of  his  work  done  in  England  between 
1674-1680  as  is  known,  does  not  indicate 
that  he  was  then  as  good  a  painter  as 
Greenhill  or  Riley,  Soest  or  Wright.  But 
tide  and  time  were  on  his  side  :  for  death 
disposed  of  Greenhill  very  soon  ;  Riley 
was  of  a  diffident  and  conservative  cast  ; 
Soest,  growing  old,  was  beginning  to  show 
it  in  his  art ;  and  Wright,  though  but  little 
over  fifty  when  Kneller  came,  was  not 
improving.  Later  Wright  went  to  Italy 
in  a  semi-secretarial  capacity,  and  so,  as 


Training  and  Association  89 

Walpole  suggests,  dropped  clean  out  ot 
the  race.  For  when  he  returned,  perhaps 
about  1690,  Kneller  was  securely 
established  and  now  by  far  the  abler 
artist.  Wright  is  said  then  to  have  tried 
his  luck  in  Scotland,  with  no  more  profit. 

On  the  other  hand  we  cannot  suppose 
that  Kneller  caused  Lely  any  uneasiness. 
For  though  he  had  youth  in  his  favour  he 
certainly  had,  in  Lely's  life- time,  no 
corresponding  artistic  advantage  over  the 
older  man.  As  we  have  seen,  he  made  a 
sort  of  sensation  when,  in  competition 
with  Lely,  he  nearly  finished  his  portrait 
of  Charles  II  by  the  time  Sir  Peter  had 
dead-coloured  his.  But,  though  Lely 
applauded  this  performance,  I  can  hardly 
suppose  that  it  exhibited  to  his  skilled  eye 
much  more  than  slickness.  Lely's  train- 
ing in,  and  lifelong  fulfilment  of,  the 
canons  of  anatomical  solidity  must  have 
contrasted  strikingly  with  the  training 
and  performance  of  Kneller  in  1678  or  so. 
Van  Dyck  was  a  master  of  line  and  of 
form- expression  by  line.  Lely  grounded 
himself  for  years  on  this  tradition  until 
solid  projective  modelling  was  second 


90  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


nature  to  him.  But  Kneller,  by  all 
accounts,  was  taught  quite  differently. 
Bol  in  comparison  with  Van  Dyck  was 
superficial  in  his  interests,  and  the  kind  of 
history  painting  which  young  men  studied 
in  Rome  and  Naples,  towards  the  close  of 
the  seventeenth  century,  did  not  over- 
burden them  with  the  science  of  funda- 
mental structure.  Nor  would  Kneller' s 
subsequent  business  in  Venice  have  in- 
evitably directed  his  attention  to  such 
first  principles.  Therefore  we  are  not 
surprised  by  the  earliest  Knellers  we  see 
in  this  country,  which  betray  an  interest 
in  surface  qualities  rather  than  in  solid 
drawing.  Indeed  they  make  us  realise 
that  but  for  the  grace  of  God  and  the 
influence  of  Lely,  Kneller  might  have  been 
no  better  painter  than  a  Wissing  or  a 
Closterman. 

But  he  clearly  differed  from  these  in 
having  the  sense  to  see  that  Lely's 
mastery  lay  deeper  than  the  colour  and 
brushwork  of  his  portraits,  and  the 
resolution  to  take  himself  in  hand  and 
gain  a  similar  mastery.  Hence  we  find 
Kneller  perpetuating  the  legacy  which 


Training  and  Association  91 


Lely  received  from  Van  Dyck  and 
bequeathed  to  his  successor.  For  about 
twenty  years  after  Lely's  death  Kneller 
steadily  developed  as  a  draughtsman, 
starting  as  nearly  as  he  could  from  the 
model  Lely's  work  of  the  middle  1660's 
provided.  Lely,  as  we  have  noted, 
gradually  became  interested  in  questions 
of  atmosphere  and  fusion.  Kneller,  too, 
outgrew  his  earlier  interest  in  carefully 
differentiated  planes  and  sculpturally 
solid  modelling.  But  his  superseding 
interest  was  not  quite  the  same  as  Lely's. 
With  him  it  took  the  form  of  a  more 
nervous  and  fluent  and  interpretative 
drawing  ;  so  that  in  his  freest  and  most 
fluent  paintings  we  can  see  the  germ  of 
Gainsborough's  almost  water-colour  use 
of  oil  paint. 

Indeed,  Kneller  is  the  duct  by  which  the 
older  stream  of  portraiture  flowed  into  the 
modern.  Historians  and  biologists  assure 
us  that  continuity  rather  than  new  starts, 
succeeding  unbridged  gaps,  is  the  true 
reading  of  the  past.  In  the  same  way  if 
we  would  justly  see  Reynolds  and  Gains- 
borough and,  much  more,  Hogarth,  we 

H 


92  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


must  truly  observe  their  relation  to  their 
predecessors.  If  we  had  to  span  from 
Lely  right  across  to  early  Gainsborough 
and  Reynolds,  with  no  intermediate  piers, 
then  we  should  be  conscious  of  a  gap 
difficult  to  bridge.  But  when  we  have  as 
stepping  stones  Kneller  and  his  immediate 
pupils,  his  contemporary  Michael  Dahl, 
who  settled  in  London  about  1688  and 
died  here  in  1723,  and  Riley  and  the 
products  of  his  studio,  the  way  runs  un- 
interruptedly to  the  great  masters  of  the 
second  half  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
Too  often  we  speak  vaguely  of  Hogarth  as 
the  founder  of  modern  British  painting  ; 
the  more  scientific  view  is  that  he  is  the 
culmination  of  the  older  tradition,  the  last 
and  best  of  the  old  school.  And  if  we 
fixed  our  eyes  on  Reynolds'  mature  work 
we  might  in  the  same  loose  way  describe 
it  as  sudden  creation,  not  evolution.  But 
if  we  regard  Reynolds'  first  beginnings, 
ere  ever  he  went  to  Italy  and  became  a 
cosmopolitan  and  scholar,  we  see  at  once 
that  he  links  on  naturally  to  the  portrai- 
ture of  Kneller  and  his  school.  Where  a 
gap  may  be  seen  with  more  apparent 


Training  and  Association  93 

justification,  is  between  the  earliest 
Reynolds  and  the  most  mature.  But 
this,  too,  can  be  negotiated  by  an  under- 
standing of  the  interplay  between  indi- 
viduality, travel  and  changing  times  and 
customs. 

A  moment  ago  the  name  of  Michael 
Dahl  came  up.  This  Swedish  painter, 
who  studied  in  France  and  Italy  before 
he  settled  down  in  England,  is  confused 
with  Kneller  more  frequently  than  is  any 
other  painter.  Not  without  cause,  since 
he  took  the  greatest  pains  to  imitate  him. 
But  he  never  became  a  draughtsman,  as 
Kneller  understood  the  word.  For,  while 
he  could  draw  the  contour  of  a  face  or 
hand  well  enough,  he  failed  to  suggest,  as 
Kneller  could,  the  solid,  bony  structure 
within.  On  the  other  hand  he  was  so 
successful  and  so  much  patronised  by  the 
great  families  that  he  may  be  said  to  have 
been  Kneller' s  rival  for  thirty  years, 
not.  however,  to  the  extent  of  causing  Sir 
Godfrey  to  lose  either  any  sleep  or  any 
work  he  could  have  taken  on.  It  is 
worth  note  that  of  Kneller' s  later  con- 
temporaries   only    Dahl  considerably 


94 


Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


shared  his  patronage  by  the  Court. 
There  seems  to  have  been  a  clearer  line 
drawn  between  these  two  favoured  artists 
and  the  rest  than  was  the  case  between 
Lely  and  the  lesser  men  of  his  day.  It 
will,  therefore,  be  enough  to  say  that  the 
better  painters  struggling  along  in 
Kneller's  shade,  between  1700-1723,  were 
Charles  Jervas  (1675  7-1739),  Kneller's 
pupil  and  Elisha ;  Joseph  Highmore 
(1692-1780),  also  Kneller's  pupil  and  an 
important  figure  in  the  transition  period 
between  his  master  and  the  Reynolds 
period,  as,  too,  was  Thomas  Hill  (1661- 
I734)  i  Jonathan  Richardson  (1665- 
1745),  Riley's  pupil,  like  Thomas  Murray 
(1663-1734)  ;  John  Vanderbank  (born 
probably  much  earlier  than  the  reputed 
date,  1694  ;  died  1739),  who  stood  with 
one  foot  in  the  Kneller  school  and  the 
other  in  Richardson's,  from  which  came, 
too,  Thomas  Hudson  (1701-1779).  This 
is  not  the  place  to  speak  of  these  save  as 
they  touch  Kneller,  or  rather  as  they  were 
affected  by  him.  And  perhaps  nothing 
more  particular  need  be  said  on  that  score 
than  this  :  though  we  rightly  distinguish 


Training  and  Association  95 

the  Soest-Riley-Richardson  school  from 
the  Van  Dyck-Lely-Kneller,  since  the  out- 
put of  these  schools  differs  in  recognisable 
characteristics,  yet  we  have  to  add  that, 
just  as  Lely  so  predominated  in  his  time 
that  at  least  a  tinge  of  him  was  reflected 
by  all  his  contemporaries,  so  Kneller 
threw  a  beam,  as  one  might  say,  on  all 
these  painters,  and  beyond  them. 

The  foreigners  whom  the  Hanoverian 
Court  harboured — Zeemans,  van  Huy- 
sings,  Van  Bleecks,  and  so  forth,  all  caught 
something  of  Kneller' s  worst  mannerisms, 
which  one  Smibert  took  as  part  of  his 
outfit  to  New  England.  From  the  slight 
knowledge  I  have  of  American  portraits, 
I  should  say  that  these  mannerisms  had  a 
very  great  influence  on  the  development 
of  this  art  across  the  Atlantic. 


CHAPTER  III 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics 

Already  we  have  commented  on  the 
paucity  of  Kneller's  recognised  pre- 1680 
work  ;  dearth  prevents  our  doing  perfect 
justice  to  him,  because,  on  the  incomplete 
evidence  before  us,  we  can  say  no  more 
than  that  he  appears  either  to  have  been 
indifferently  taught  or  else  to  have 
neglected  rather  special  opportunities. 
We  have  been  duly  impressed  by  the 
legendary  splendour  of  his  education,  to 
which  Ferdinand  Bol,  Rembrandt,  and 
Frans  Hals,  Carlo  Maratti  and  Bernini,* 
to  say  nothing  of  the  works  by  Raphael 
and  Titian  which  he  is  said  to  have  studied 
in  Italy,  are  alleged  to  have  contributed. 
Then,  with  our  eyes  a  little  dazzled  by  the 

*  Byng  asserts  that  Kneller  studied  archi- 
tecture in  connection  with  his  mention  of 
Bernini.  It  is  worth  note  that  recently  attention 
has  been  drawn  to  a  series  of  portraits  painted  by 
Bernini,  (Rassegna  d'Arte,  1920,  p.  145). 

97 


98  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


brilliant  eclectic  picture  formed  by  all 
these  names,  we  turn  to  see  a  few  flat, 
undistinguished  portraits  which  appear  to 
belong  to  his  first  years  in  England.  In- 
deed, but  for  one  surprisingly  good 
picture,  the  Cornelius  Bruyn  (1355),  in 
the  Rijks  Museum,  which  may  reasonably 
be  assigned  to  a  yet  earlier  period,  we  are 
at  present  but  entitled  to  say  that  when 
Kneller  came  to  England  he  was  a  quite 
mediocre  painter,  not  only  as  regards 
character  interpretation  but  also  techni- 
cally. His  line  is  coarse  and  inexpressive, 
his  modelling  empty  and  his  faces  are 
mild  convex  forms,  reminding  one  of 
masks.  About  the  only  difference 
between  his  work  and  that  of  such  men 
as  Closterman  and  Wissing  is  that  it  is 
less  showy  and,  in  colour,  more  yellow. 
Perhaps  this  was  the  splendid  fruit  of  his 
intimacy  with  the  Venetian  secret  ! 

Against  this  disappointing  inventory  of 
facts  we  have  to  set  the  tradition  recorded 
by  Byng  and  Buckeridge  that  Kneller' s 
efforts  in  portraying  the  Banks  family,  his 
successes  with  Monmouth's  secretary, 
Mr.    Vernon,    and    Monmouth's  own 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  99 

portrait,  gave  him  such  a  standing  that 
the  Court  flocked  to  his  studio,  and  he 
was  permitted  to  paint  the  King.  Of 
course,  merely  to  paint  the  King  did  not 
mean  very  much  :  Riley  and  Wright,  for 
instance,  had  shared  that  treat  with 
Lely,  and  yet  did  not  secure  his  business 
at  his  death.  But  this  Kneller  did,  out- 
pacing and  out-staying  all  competitors. 
We  must  therefore  credit  Kneller,  as 
against  the  dismal  debit  set  out  above, 
not  only  with  traditional  successes  but 
also  with  actual  triumph.  And  here  we 
should  interject  that  if  his  portrait  of  the 
Duke  of  Monmouth,  which  is  said  to  have 
set  the  seal  on  his  first  success,  is  found, 
that  may  prove  how  superior  his  accom- 
plishment was,  before  1680,  to  our  present 
estimate.  Hitherto,  however,  such  search 
as  I  have  made,  in  quarters  likely  to 
contain  this  Duke  of  Monmouth,  has  been 
fruitless.  Either  the  portrait  has  been 
lost  or  I  failed  to  recognise  it.* 

*  At  Dalkeith  Palace  there  is  a  charming  full- 
length  Monmouth,  to  my  eye,  when  I  saw  it 
many  years  ago,  evidently  by  Riley.  More 
percipient  students  may  discover  in  it  Kneller's 
authorship. 


ioo  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 

In  this  connection  we  must  note  a 
portrait  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery, 
once  called  Isaac  Newton,  I  believe,  but 
now  Godfrey  Kneller  by  himself.  We  see 
a  young  man,  apparently  about  twenty- 
five,  certainly  not  over  thirty.  It  is  full 
in  modelling  and  curiously  pale  in  colour 
and  unlike  any  portrait  I  have  seen.  If 
it  represent  Kneller,  it  would  have  been 
painted  probably  about  1671,  and  not 
later  than  1676.  I  do  not  say  that 
facially  it  is  irreconcilable  with  later 
authenticated  portraits.  On  the  other 
hand  it  is  markedly  inconsistent  with 
any  painting  known  to  be  by  Kneller. 
It  differs  considerably  from  the  Amster- 
dam Cornelius  Bruyn  and  bears  no 
resemblance  to  a  portrait  in  the  Victoria 
and  Albert  Museum,  by  Kneller,  and 
said  to  be  his  own  portrait  as  a  young 
man.  But  we  must  remember  that  at 
present  our  acquaintance  with  his  early 
works  is  very  slight.  If  this  Portrait 
Gallery  picture,  which  at  present  is  a 
puzzle,  be  really  by  him,  then  we  must 
regard  it  as  something  of  a  freak ;  for, 
though  it  may  refer  most  valuably  to  the 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  101 

Italian  style  of  Kneller,  it  certainly  does 
not  lead  up  to  the  English  work  by  which 
we  know  him.  In  the  same  way,  if,  as  I 
suspect,  the  Amsterdam  portrait  is  a  relic 
of  his  earliest  manner — Bruyn  was  born 
in  1624  and  appears  no  more  than  forty, 
at  the  most — it  is  curiously  unrelated  to 
the  earliest  English  Knellers  we  know, 
and  much  better  than  they. 

From  1680,  the  year  of  Lely's  death, 
the  evidence  of  Kneller's  activity  mounts 
up,  so  that  though  the  portraits  of  this 
period  are  clearly  different  from,  say,  the 
portraits  of  the  1690' s  and  later,  we  have 
no  difficulty  in  studying  them  and 
recognising  in  them  the  gradual  develop- 
ment of  Kneller's  style.  Perhaps  we  can 
best  summarise  the  character  of  these 
earlier  portraits,  in  relation  to  the  later 
and  more  usual,  by  describing  them  as 
flatter  in  projection  and  more  smoothly 
convex  in  plane.  That  is  to  say  that, 
chiefly  as  regards  the  men  portraits  of 
this  time,  the  bony  structure  beneath  the 
surface  is  insufficiently  realised,  so  that 
the  recessive  planes  of  a  head  are  im- 
perfectly suggested.    Hence  we  are  con- 


102  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


scious  of  that  mask-like  flatness  of  the 
cheeks,  already  alluded  to  in  connection 
with  yet  earlier  pieces.  A  conveniently 
accessible  example  of  Kneller' s  modelling 
and  technique  is  the  Charles  Montagu, 
Earl  of  Halifax,  born  1661,  and  here 
apparently  not  more  than  twenty-five,  if 
that.  The  face  is  relatively  flat,  the 
colour  is  rather  florid,  and  the  painting  is 
distinctly  coarse  compared  with  that  in 
later  works.  The  Wren  of  171 1,  hanging 
near,  is  an  instructive  comparison.  Men 
of  most  times  and  places  have,  in 
portraiture  at  any  rate,  more  clearly 
defined  bone  structure  than  women.  In 
Lely's  and  Kneller* s  day  round  plumpness 
was  fashionable  in  women.  The  numbei 
of  leanish,  long  faced  women  portraits 
painted  by  these  artists  is  relatively  small. 
We  can  hardly  suppose  that  Nature  was 
entirely  responsible  for  this  prevalence  of 
a  round  faced  type,  more  especially  when 
we  recall  that  but  a  few  years  before,  in 
Van  Dyck's  day,  the  long,  thin  oval  was 
more  common.  Possibly  the  conspicuous 
success  of  Nell  Gwyn  and  Louise  de 
Querouaille,  in  the  principal  business  in 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  103 

which  women  were  then  interested,  caused 
most  fashionable  ladies  to  wish  for  sleek, 
round  faces.  Their  painters  had  been 
less  than  gentlemen,  had  they  not  seen  to 
it  that  art,  at  any  rate,  produced  a 
thought  consonant  with  this  motherly 
desire.  Kneller,  for  his  part,  played  up  to 
this  ambition,  if  such  it  were,  like  any 
modern  face  manipulator;  so  that  we 
find  most  of  his  earlier  women  portraits 
with  faces  of  an  almost  ball-like  surface : 
smoothly  inflated  to  a  nicety.  Later  he 
modified  this  semi-globular  pattern  by 
allowing  for  the  truer  niceties  of  modelling. 

His  technique  at  this  time  is  the  most 
individual  part  of  him.  Here,  probably, 
we  see  signs  of  his  more  cosmopolitan 
education.  For  at  will  he  was  able  to 
paint  now  in  Lely's  adaptation  of  Van 
Dyck's  style,  and  now  in  a  method  which 
so  far  as  I  know  had  not  been  previously 
practised  in  England.  Especially  in  his 
draperies,  in  some  of  his  earlier  portraits, 
we  find  an  extraordinary  richness  of 
impasto,  which,  while  it  would  not  surprise 
us  in  a  Reynolds,  causes  us  in  portraiture 
of  about  1690  to  rub  our  eyes  and  look 


104  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


again.  Then,  again,  contemporary 
portraits  by  him  are  painted  in  a  thin 
and  liquid  technique,  which  reminds  one 
of  nobody  but  Gainsborough.  If  we  may 
judge  by  events,  Kneller  concluded  that 
for  him  and  his  necessities  this  thin  and 
liquid  technique  was  the  more  service- 
able. And,  regarding  the  mass  of  his 
commissions  and  the  consequent  need  for 
a  swift  means  of  dealing  with  them,  we  can 
see  that  he  was  right,  though  in  some 
portraits  it  is  evident  that  he  scamped 
even  this  economical  technique. 

In  the  case  of  technique  so  irregular  as 
Kneller's  it  is  unwise  to  dogmatise  about 
method  or  to  attempt  to  reduce  it  to  a 
settled  formula.  But,  striking  an  average, 
we  are  justified  in  saying  that  the  method 
he  used  most  frequently  with  the  most 
success  was  a  thinly  painted  method. 
First  he  drew  the  features  and  contours 
in  a  supple,  free  and  sensitive  line,  which 
by  itself  suggests  the  projection  and 
recession  of  the  various  planes.  Then  he 
laid  in  a  monochrome  of  greenish  gray 
or  silver  gray  which  serves  eventually  for 
the  half-tones.    Then,  working  on  this 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  105 

ground  while  it  was  wet,  and  nicely  leaving 
what  he  meant  to  stand  as  final,  he  laid  in 
the  half-lights  and  lights  in  a  thin  liquid 
overpainting  of  virtually  two  colours, 
cool  ivory  and  carmine.  Where  necessary, 
last  of  all,  he  added  the  stronger  accent  of 
a  deeper  and  warmer  tone.  In  the  hands 
of  so  sure  a  draughtsman  as  Kneller 
became,  and  so  fluent  a  brushman,  this 
system  was  very  rapid  ;  in  two  sittings 
the  head  and  bust  and  arms  would  be 
complete.  A  similar  simplification  would 
make  short  work  of  the  draperies  and 
accessories,  with  which,  doubtless,  his 
assistants  often  helped.  In  a  great 
number  of  commissions  Kneller  doubtless 
entrusted  these  latter  items  entirely  to 
assistants,  and  many  of  the  heads 
attributed  to  Kneller,  some  with  his 
signature  attached,  are  almost  certainly 
the  work  of  studio  hands.  Too  seldom 
he  took  pains  to  attempt  a  variation  on 
the  stock  of  designs  he  had  inherited  from 
Lely ;  very  rarely  was  he  sufficiently 
interested  to  work  out  a  novel  play  of 
colour,  though  he  is  a  fine  and  subtle 
colourist. 


io6  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


The  best  period  of  Kneller's  output 
extends,  roughly,  from  about  1695  to 
1715.  In  those  limits  we  find  a  series  of 
portraits,  men  and  women,  which  for 
brilliance  and  sound  standard  of  tech- 
nique compare  evenly  with  the  record  of 
any  court  painter.  Needless  to  say  that 
this  period  is  not  free  from  Kneller's 
besetting  sin  of  carelessness  :  and  perhaps 
we  could  count  up  against  Kneller,  in  his 
best  period,  more  instances  of  this  kind 
than  we  could  against  another.  Later 
we  shall  discuss  in  detail  the  technique  of 
this  period  in  relation  to  his  finest  work. 
Here  it  will  be  enough  to  refer  again  to 
the  Christopher  Wren,  in  the  Portrait 
Gallery,  painted  in  171 1.  This  is  a 
perfect  example  of  the  master's  almost 
magical  use  of  pigment.  The  simplicity 
of  his  process,  the  transparent  freshness  of 
the  result ;  the  faultless  skill  which  makes 
the  silver  under-painting  play  through  the 
warm  second  film,  the  apparent  ease  with 
which  the  gradation  of  colour  is  managed, 
and  the  keen  incisive  form,  all  prove  that 
Kneller,  when  he  liked,  could  handle 
paint  as  well  as  any  master. 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  107 


Walpole  considered  the  following 
portraits  the  most  creditable  to  Kneller's 
pencil : — 

Frederic,  Duke  of  Schomberg,  Equestrian, 
and  his  best  picture  in  that  style, 
(Marquis  of  Lothian,  Newbattle  Abbey, 
Scotland.) 

Henry    St.  John,   Viscount  Bolingbroke 

(Petworth.) 
Sir  Christopher  Wren,  sitting  and  holding 

a  scroll,  a  View  of  St.  Paul's.  (Royal 

Society.) 

The  same,  whole  length,  sitting.  (Theatre, 
Oxford.) 

Dean     Aldrich,      half  length.  (Christ 

Church,  Oxford.) 
Dr.   Sacheverel,   which  gives   the  best 

specimen  of  a  clerical  wig  of  that  time. 

See  the  engraving  by  Smith. 
Lady    M.    W.    Montagu,    the  portrait 

intended  for  Pope.  (Luton.) 
His  Own  Head  and  Pope's,  given  to  the 

Bodleian  Gallery. 
John  Lock,  in  His  Own  Hair. 
Bishop  Burnet.  (Wimpole.) 
Charles  Mordaunt,  Earl  of  Peterborough. 

(Dantsey,  Wilts.) 
1 


io8  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


Joseph  Addison.  (Bodleian.) 
John  Evelyn.    (Wootton,  Surrey.) 

In  Walpole,  Vol.  III.,  page  232,  is  con- 
densed correspondence  between  Pepys 
and  Kneller  concerning  the  Bodleian 
portrait  of  Dr.  Wallis  which  apparently 
Kneller  ranked  high  in  his  ceuvre. 

When  the  picture  was  completed, 
Sir  Godfrey  wrote  to  Mr.  Pepys,  "  I  can 
show  I  never  did  a  better  picture,  nor  so 
good  a  one  in  my  life  ;  which  is  the 
opinion  of  all  that  has  seen  it  ;  and  which 
I  have  done  merely  for  the  respect  I  have 
for  your  person,  sense,  and  reputation  ; 
and  for  the  love  of  so  great  a  man  as 
Dr.  Wallis." 

In  1716  Kneller  was  seventy  years  old. 
Yet  we  find  him  still  producing  crisp  and 
vigorous  work.  As  late  as  1719  he 
painted  a  portrait  called  Princess  Sophia 
(reproduced  in  Lely  and  the  Stuart 
Portrait  Painters,  II.,  p.  92.)  which  in 
fluency  of  touch  and  freshness  of  character 
is  an  innovation.  Leaving  the  stock 
Kneller  behind,  it  strides  a  long  way 
towards  Hogarth.  But,  of  course,  the 
sand  was  slipping  through,  faster  and 


Style,  Development,  Characteristics  109 

faster.  Kneller  was  very  old,  his  hand 
was  losing  grip.  The  Lord  Cowper  in  the 
Portrait  Gallery,  painted  in  1722,  is  an  old 
man's  work,  blurred  and  soft.  Though 
restoration  has  further  mollified  this 
picture,  we  can  see,  comparing  it  with  the 
Wren  of  a  decade  earlier,  how  dimmed  the 
painter's  eye  had  grown,  how  slow  and 
tentative  his  hand.  Even  then  it  is  a 
creditable  achievement  which  few 
painters  of  seventy-six  could  better. 


CHAPTER  IV 


The  Quality  of  the  Artist,  and  his 
Influence 

In  discussing  Lely  we  considered  the 
effect  of  the  permque  upon  his  reputation. 
It  hardly,  then,  seems  necessary  to  repeat 
that  argument,  merely  substituting 
Kneller's  name  for  Lely's.  We  need  say 
no  more  than  that  we  have  just  as  much 
reason  on  our  side  in  contending  that 
Sir  Godfrey  suffers  from  the  same  cause 
as  Sir  Peter.  In  his  case,  too,  we  can 
point  to  such  a  wigless  portrait  as  the 
Charterhouse  Doctor  Burnett  to  support 
our  claim.  And,  such  is  the  insidious 
force  of  prejudice,  if  we  did  not  know  that 
this  noble  work  was  by  Kneller,  we  should 
rank  it  even  higher  than  we  do  at  present. 
If  certain  others  of  his  best  portraits  were 
unwigged — for  example,  the  Petworth 
Unknown  Man  [No.  284  reproduced  in 
in 


H2  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


the  Pctworth  Catalogue,  1919],  the 
Richard  Boyle,  Viscount  Shannon,  at  Bay- 
fordbury,  the  Duke  of  Portland  at  Welbeck 
(reproduced  in  Lely  and  the  Stuart  Portrait 
Painters,  II.,  p.  86),  and  the  National 
Portrait  Gallery  Henry  Sidney,  Earl  Oj 
Romney,  and  we  were  unaware  of  their 
authorship,  we  skould  recognise  that  at 
his  top  form  Kneller  is  one  of  the  best 
painters  who  have  worked  in  England. 
As  regards  his  position  among  his  Euro- 
pean contemporaries,  our  inveterate 
modesty  about  English  produce,  and  the 
general  conspiracy  to  believe  that  French 
painters  are  always  better  craftsmen, 
with  better  taste  and  a  sounder  tradition 
than  British,  blind  us  to  the  relative 
superiority  of  Kneller  to  Rigaud,  Lar- 
gilliere  and  Nattier,  so  far  as  painter-like 
quality  and  true  draughtsmanship  are 
concerned.  We  can  go  further  still  with 
perfect  safety  and  say  that,  judged  on  the 
same  grounds,  Perronneau  is  Kneller' s 
inferior.  No  oil  painting  by  that  ad- 
mirable and  expensive  artist  is  as  well 
constructed  or  as  well  painted  as  the  best 
works  by  Kneller,  though  they  are  wittier 


Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


Quality  of  the  Artist  113 


and  incomparably  more  charming.  But 
it  would  be  dishonest  to  attempt  to  main- 
tain that  our  higher  appreciation  of 
Nattier  and  Perronneau,  and  the  conse- 
quent condition  of  their  market,  are  in- 
explicable and  unjustifiable. 

What,  then,  is  wrong  with  Kneller  ? 
In  three  words,  insensitiveness  to  charm. 
Here  at  once  the  door  is  opened  to  endless 
argument.  Subjectivity  versus  objec- 
tivity ;  association  versus  pure  abstrac- 
tion ;  sentimentality  and  sex  against  cold, 
precise  statement  of  significant  form. 
Fortunate  we  are  in  having  no  business, 
in  this  connection,  with  the  profounder 
conditions  of  portraiture.  For  neither 
Nattier  nor  Rigaud,  Kneller  nor 
Perronneau  is  counted  with  the  revealers 
of  deep-seated  emotion  or  subtle  thought. 
The  appeal  that  Nattier  makes  is,  like 
Boucher's,  quite  subjective.  I  refuse  to 
think  how  Freud  and  his  tribe  of  psycho- 
analysts would  diagnose  the  complexes  of 
Nattier  and  Boucher.  But  if  we  could 
have  had  the  benefit  of  Nattier's  own 
explanation  of  his  work,  it  might  have 
been  quite  simply  that  he  did  his  best  to 


H4  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


make  his  sitters,  of  either  sex,  appear  unto 
others  as  desirable  as  they  would  they 
could  appear  unto  themselves.  For  his 
tolerable  success  in  this  ambition,  Nattier 
is  one  of  the  masters  for  whom  California 
and  New  York  will  pay  the  thousands 
which  London  and  Paris  no  longer  can 
afford.  Kneller,  on  the  other  hand, 
whatever  his  adventures  with  the 
Quaker's  wife,  would,  I  suspect,  have  been 
less  interesting  to  the  psycho-analysts, 
and  if  we  could  have  interviewed  him  for 
the  gossip  column  in  the  Sketchy  Mirror, 
our  headline  would  probably  have  run  : 
"  Artist  bored  stiff ;  doesn't  care  how 
women  look."  For  that  ennui  and  that 
indifference  Kneller  is  still  paying. 

If  we  ever  outgrow  our  superstition 
that  French  painters  are  infallible  crafts- 
men and  super-humanly  unsentimental, 
dipped  at  birth,  heels  and  all,  in  prophy- 
lactic waters,  we  shall  recognise  that  the 
average  painter  of  the  dix-huitieme  is 
akin,  in  spirit  at  least,  to  the  ordinary 
academician,  one  of  whose  vices  has  justly 
been  defined  as  the  desire  to  be  attractive 
at  all  costs.    Now  Kneller  cannot  be 


Quality  of  the  Artist  115 


charged  with  this.  The  worthier  breed  of 
artist  tries  to  be  true,  though  incidentally 
his  work  may  be  quite  attractive.  How 
far,  if  at  all,  may  we  include  Kneller  in 
the  latter  category  ?  Without  meaning 
more  than  we  have  justification  for,  we 
can  fairly  claim  that  the  spirit  of  object- 
ive truth  exhibited  in  a  number  of 
his  portraits  warrants  such  inclusion. 
Whether  portraiture  can  really  be  "  ob- 
jective is  so  debatable  that  perhaps  we 
ought  to  define  the  issue  less  equivocally. 
Indeed,  so  far  as  one  can  tell,  all  that  this 
talk  of  subjective  and  objective  portraits 
practically  means  is  that  in  one  the 
painter's  personal  bias,  or  his  itch  to  be 
attractive,  demonstrably  falsifies  truth, 
and  in  the  other  he  permits  neither 
private  prejudice  nor  the  wish  to  please  to 
contradict  his  instinctive  impressions.  If 
his  intuition  of  a  sitter  be  unflattering  he 
will  not  deliberately  palliate  its  interpre- 
tation ;  if  he  sees  his  sitter  as  a  "  bounder/1 
in  the  vulgar  phrase,  or  as  a  ninny,  he 
will  not  paint  him  as  a  Vere  de  Vere 
or  as  a  film  man  of  iron.  He  will  not 
consciously  "  improve  "  on  nature  nor  be 


n6  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


so  emotionally  undisciplined  that  his 
sentiment  puts  a  false  construction  on  life. 

We  barely  know  an  instance  of  Van 
Dyck  approaching  a  portrait  in  an 
attitude  of  aloof  or  disapproving  criticism. 
He  saw  the  world,  apparently,  through  a 
perpetual  glamour,  so  that  the  lowest 
depth  to  which  his  clients  could  fall  was 
insipidity.  Lely,  as  we  have  seen,  went 
further  occasionally,  interpreting,  in  his 
rather  sullen  way,  morose  and  harassed 
minds  and  gross  appetites.  In  Kneller 
I  think  we  can  detect  a  more  actively 
personal  attitude,  which  allies  him  more 
closely  to  modern  realism  in  portraiture. 
The  classic  example  of  mordant  realism  in 
modern  painting  is  Goya,  whose  mind,  in 
this  respect,  was  as  a  rapier  to  Kneller's 
broad-sword.  In  the  Spaniard  we  often 
can  detect,  if  not  malevolence,  at  least 
cynicism ;  his  portraits  are  a  bitter 
commentary  on  life. 

A  better  parallel  for  Kneller,  perhaps, 
and  one  immediately  available  for 
reference,  is  Augustus  John.  Not  only  in 
draughtsmanship  and  brushwork,  but  also 
in  mood,  Kneller's  Henry  Sidney,  Earl  of 


Quality  of  the  Artist  117 


Romney,  in  the  Portrait  Gallery,  or  his 
Marquess  of  Tweeddale,  in  the  National 
Gallery,  are  of  the  same  blood  as  the 
ordinary  John  portrait  of  Peace  Con- 
ference Pillars,  or  Port  Sunlight  Pro- 
prietors. These  portraits  are  well  worth 
close  study,  for  they  are  at  once  the 
justification  and  indictment  of  Sir 
Godfrey.  They  fully  justify  him  on  two 
grounds,  technical  and  interpretative. 

In  the  Tweeddale  we  have  spontaneous 
painting  which  amounts,  if  I  may  be 
pardoned  a  somewhat  involved  idea,  to  a 
sort  of  thinking  aloud  in  paint.  The 
portrait  is  not  a  sketch,  au  premier  coup, 
but  a  finished  piece,  achieved  by  complete 
mastery  of  method  and  by  unerring 
execution.  The  method  is  not  one  of 
simple,  single  coat  impasto,  but  one  which 
gets  its  effect,  apparently  in  one  sitting, 
by  the  device  of  transparent  over- 
painting.  When  this  effect  is  attained  by 
a  process  of  leisured  glazings  and 
scumblings,  it  is  respectable.  But  when 
it  is  attained  so  directly  and  swiftly,  with 
each  touch  final,  each  stroke  expressing 
form,  and  no  touch  or  stroke  impinging 


n8  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


on  another's  job,  it  is  astonishing.  This 
instantaneous  but  finally  right  technique 
is  possible  only  to  a  master  who  knows 
exactly  what  pigment  will  do  and  who  has 
in  his  finger-tips  the  knack  of  swift  and 
vivid  draughtsmanship.  But  for  Kneller 
and  Hogarth,  whose  Shrimp  Girl  is  a 
masterpiece  of  direct  and  subtle  painting, 
we  do  not  find  examples  of  this  knowledge 
and  ability  in  English  painting  before 
quite  modern  times.  Not  that  Van  Dyck 
and  Lely,  Reynolds  and  Gainsborough, 
were  deficient  either  in  craftsmanship  or 
Knowledge  of  form.  But,  somehow,  they 
do  not  seem  to  have  regarded  this  direct 
manner  of  painting  as  practical  politics. 
Indeed,  I  doubt  whether  painters  generally 
turned  their  attention  to  the  possibilities 
of  direct  painting,  as  distinct  from  more 
or  less  elaborate  process,  before  the  nine- 
teenth century.  Up  till  then  the  final 
value  of  every  brush  stroke,  the  propriety 
of  making  each  touch  do  its  job,  once  for 
all,  was  not  considered  in  the  schools,  and 
I  believe  this  creed  was  not  familiar  in 
English  art  teaching  before  Legros  in- 
corporated it  in  Slade  School  principles. 


Quality  of  the  Artist  119 


Kneller  may  in  this  respect  be  regarded 
as  a  pioneer  of  modern  technique. 

We  have  noted  that  our  painter  was 
quite  a  swell  in  the  fashionable  set  of  his 
world.  And  we  know  that  an  absurd 
vanity  supported  him.  I  am  not  aware 
of  the  character  of  the  Marquess  of 
Tweeddale.  But  regarding  Kneller' s 
portrait,  one  has  not  much  difficulty  in 
supposing  that  he,  too,  was  a  mighty  man 
of  state,  who  did  not  surfer  unduly  from 
self-underestimation.  Nor  may  it  be 
far-fetched  to  read  in  this  portrait  that 
Kneller  was  not  convinced  it  was  his  duty 
to  play  S}'Cophant  to  the  great  man's 
arrogance.  For  here  is  no  desire  to  be 
attractive  ;  instead  we  find  pitiless  reso- 
lution to  analyse  unpleasant  character. 
And  it  is  a  remarkable  exposure.  More 
than  any  portrait  of  its  time  in  England 
or  in  France  it  makes  history  alive.  If 
we  wished  for  an  embodiment  of  the 
swollen  insolence  and  impervious  scorn  of 
the  less  captivating  type  of  the  Whig  or 
Tory  noble,  we  could  hardly  find  a  more 
adequate  instance.  Grossly  materialistic 
and  sceptical ;    cynically  corrupt  and 


120  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 

sensual ;  the  natural  product  of  social 
and  political  conditions  since  1649, 
great  officials  of  that  century's  decay 
seem  typified  in  Kneller' s  portrait.  Nor 
is  it  merely  a  record  of  a  particular  era  or 
caste,  since  it  illuminates  for  us  inveterate 
and  universal  character. 

The  Earl  of  Rotnney*  (1700)  is  a  speci- 
men of  Kneller' s  more  usual  technique  : 
less  positive  in  brushwork,  cooler  in 
colour  than  the  Tweeddale.  But  the 
same  liquid  fusion  of  the  silvery  under- 
painting  with  the  ivory  and  carmine  of  the 
lights  is  noticeable.  With  extraordinary 
skill  this  under-painting  graduates  into 
the  warmer  upper  coat,  the  colours 
merging,  and  the  thin  transparent  paint 
imperceptibly  becoming  a  fluent  impasto. 
Last  of  all,  where  needed,  a  strong  tone  of 
burnt  sienna  is  applied.  In  character 
interpetation  it  is  more  intimate  than 
the  Tweeddale,  If  Kneller  was  anti- 
pathetic to  the  insolent  Scot  and  showed 
his  resentment,  he  seems  to  have  ap- 
proached Henry  Sidney,   that  greatly 


*  Vide  the  Burlington  Magazine,  Vol.  28,  p.  87. 


Quality  of  the  Artist  121 


daring  libertine  who  incurred  James  H's 
peculiar  displeasure,  with  something  like 
sympathy.  He  makes  no  effort  to  dis- 
guise the  proud  sardonic  temper  of  the 
man  ;  he  sees  him  clearly  as  a  hard-bitten 
campaigner,  wasted  by  deep  and  dis- 
creditable experience,  as  one  whose  easy 
principles  and  perfect  selfishness  would 
disqualify  him  for  any  position  of  trust. 
The  restless  hawk-like  face,  with  hungry 
eyes  and  infirm  lips,  betrays  a  craving  yet 
unslaked.  It  is  not  the  face  of  the  gross 
and  sated  sensualist, — for  example,  Lely's 
Wycherley  in  the  Portrait  Gallery.  The 
feverish,  unhappy  eyes  are  those  of  the 
prematurely  aging  roue,  still  ridden  by 
desire.  And  yet  in  the  proud  and 
thrusting  carriage  of  the  head,  in  the  keen 
and  beautiful  lines,  and  the  freedom  from 
complacent  scorn,  we  feel  that  Kneller 
discerned  that  somewhere  in  the  man  lay 
something  rather  splendid. 

This  portrait  and  the  Marquess  of 
Tweeddale,  we  have  said,  are  at  once  a 
justification  and  indictment  of  their 
author.  For  we  must  wonder  why  works 
of  this  perfect  technique  and  significant 


122  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


character  are  the  minor  part  of  Kneller' s 
output,  and  what  is  the  explanation  of  the 
mass  of  slipshod  and  perfunctory  stuff  he 
turned  out.  We  might  put  up  a  specious 
defence  by  contending  that,  if  Kneller 
were  judged  by  his  best  works  only, 
which  make  a  respectably  long  list,  he 
would  hold  his  own  well  as  regards 
quality  and  number  with  any  portrait 
painter  of,  as  one  may  put  it,  his  weight. 
His  Dr.  Burnett  (1693),  of  the  Charter- 
house, his  Lady  Mar  (1715),  at  Alloa 
Park,  the  Duke  of  Portland  (1697)  at 
Welbeck,  the  Unknown  Man  (c.  1690)  at 
Petworth,  the  Kitkat  Lord  Wharton 
(1717),  Lord  Burlington  (1717),  Lord 
Shannon,  Sir  Samuel  Garth  and  Mayn- 
waring,  the  Clumber  Edward  Fowler, 
Bishop  of  Gloucester  (1711),  and  the 
National  Portrait  Gallery  Wren  (1711), 
keen  and  sure  in  handling,  humorous  in 
feeling,  all  are  masterly  achievements. 
The  Burnett,  in  beautiful  use  of  paint  and 
dignified  conception,  ranks  with  the  best 
portraits  painted  in  England.  The  Lady 
Mar,  with  a  colour  scheme  of  pale 
biscuit,  Naples  yellow,  silver  white  and 


National  Gallery 

Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


Quality  of  the  Artist  123 


black,  is  refined  and  winning — almost 
charming.  Curiously  enough  her  whim 
to  be  painted  in  a  man's  perruque  adds  to 
the  attractiveness  of  the  portrait.  The 
Kitkat  Richard  Boyle,  Viscount  Shannon, 
of  about  1717,  has  all  the  qualities  of 
spontaneity  and  final  Tightness  which  we 
have  discussed  in  relation  to  the  Marqu.ss 
of  Tweeddale  and  Earl  of  Romney.  The 
flesh  grays  are  silvery,  as  in  Gains- 
borough's most  silvery  portraits,  the 
handling  is  as  fluent  as  Gainsborough's, 
but  with  a  richer  impasto.  Each  stroke 
does  its  business,  once  for  all  :  the  result 
combines  the  elusive  flow  of  a  sketch  with 
the  solidity  and  research  of  a  complete 
picture.  Three  other  pictures  must  be 
mentioned  here  :  the  strangely  emotional 
portrait  of  Wycherley  at  Knole,  painted 
about  1705,  which  rather  tantalisingly 
implies  that  somewhere  in  Kneller  lay  a 
germ  of  true  imagination  and  insight ;  a 
charming  child  portrait  of  Wriothesley 
Russell,  at  Woburn,  and  an  equally  sym- 
pathetic and  unaffected  portrait  of  The 
Ladies  Churchill  at  Althorp.  These  throw 
an  unexpected  light  on  him,  since  most 

K 


124  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


of  his  child  portraits  are  tediously 
un-childlike. 

This  list  could  be  lengthened,  of  course, 
by  many  other  thoughtful  portraits  of 
impeccable  technique,  but  a  longer 
could  be  compiled  from  Kneller' s  in- 
different and  downright  bad  work.  And 
if  our  proposition  is  that  he  did  enough 
good  work  to  be  included  with  our  best 
painters,  we  must  also  recognise  that  his 
inferior  and  quite  worthless  portraits 
proportionately  far  outnumber  the  in- 
ferior productions  of  those  others.  If 
some  of  his  best  pictures  are  as  finely  done 
as  Van  Dyck's,  none  of  the  latter's  least 
worthy  pieces  approach  the  mechanical 
emptiness  of  Kneller' s  indifferent  stratum, 
and  certainly  Lely's  worst  work  was  not 
so  poor  as  Kneller's. 

Let  us  resist  the  temptation  to  aggran- 
dise Kneller,  and  honestly  attempt  to 
place  him.  We  have  indicated  the 
quality  of  his  best  production,  and  every- 
one knows  that  of  his  worst.  I  will  not 
say  that  specimens  of  his  lowest  level  can 
be  seen  in  the  National  Portrait  Gallery. 
But  for  ready  reference  his  Lady  Anne 


Quality  of  the  Artist  125 


Churchill  can  be  studied  there  as  a  typical 
example  of  his  insufferable  boredom  and 
shirking.  As  we  have  already  intimated, 
his  mechanical  aptitude  for  working 
whether  he  was  bored  or  interested,  and 
his  plan  of  allowing  deplorably  bad  work 
to  leave  his  easel,  when  suffering  from  lack 
of  interest,  were  his  great  vices.  More 
than  any  other  painter  of  his  gifts  he 
indulged  them.  But  that  is  not  all.  He 
was  naturally  of  slow  sympathies  :  stodgy 
in  perception.  His  most  winning  women 
portraits  miss  subtle  charm  and  breeding. 
In  a  fatal  way  he  reduced  almost  every  one 
he  painted  to  a  family  likeness  to  some 
phlegmatic  Teutonic  ideal.  Therefore  we 
may  fairly  say  that,  so  far  as  Kneller 
helps  us,  we  have  really  no  idea  of  the 
English  character  of  society  from  1680- 
1723.  His  habit  of  generalisation  and 
reduction  to  a  foreign  type  effectually 
obstructs  our  view.  In  this,  as  we  have 
already  said,  he  resembles  Lely. 

Perhaps  the  chief  indictment  against 
Kneller  is  that  of  generalisation,  the 
common  fault  of  rapid  workmanship  and 
shallow   feeling.    The   number   of  his 


126  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


portraits  which  convince  us  of  an  indi- 
vidual, with  special  character  and  traits, 
solely  his  or  her  own,  is  very  small.  In 
fairness  we  must  admit  that  the  number 
of  such  portraits  in  Van  Dyck's  ceuvre  is 
not  large,  and  of  course  it  is  less  in  Lely's. 
And  when  we  turn  on  to  the  great 
English  painters  of  the  eighteenth  century 
we  are  not  satisfied  that  separate  indi- 
viduality of  character  is  their  forte.  It 
is  true  that  Reynold's  range  is  about  as 
wide  as  that  of  any  painter  of  his  class, 
but  Gainsborough  and  Romney  and  Rae- 
burn  are  more  restricted.  And  though 
Lawrence's  range  is  rather  wider  than 
Kneller's,  Hoppner's,  if  there  be  any- 
thing to  choose,  is  narrower.  Had 
Lawrence  and  Hoppner  worked  on  the 
material  with  which  Kneller  was  con- 
fronted, we  can  assume  that  their 
achievement  would  be  weaker  and  more 
monotonous  than  his  ;  for,  whereas 
Kneller  can  fall  back  on  drawing  and 
mastery  of  paint  as  some  set-off  against 
his  lack  of  human  interest,  Lawrence 
and  Hoppner  would  have  little  to  com- 
mend them  if  severed  from  the  suave 


Quality  of  the  Artist  127 


charm  and  sentiment  of  their  time  and 
types. 

While  Lely  had  the  honour  of  syn- 
chronising with  three  of  the  greatest 
masters  of  portraiture,  Kneller's  lines 
were  laid  in  a  period  of  almost  unmitigated 
mediocrity.  Art  was  never  at  a  lower  ebb 
than  from  1680-1710.  The  Italian 
Renaissance  had  long  subsided  to  a  dead 
level  of  insipid  mannerism,  barely  relieved 
by  the  academic  skill  of  a  Piazzetta,  a 
Menescardi,  or  a  Zanchi.  France  had  her 
Knellers  in  Largilliere,  the  elder  de  Troy 
and  Rigaud.  Holland's  glory  was 
darkened  when  within  a  few  years  of  each 
other,  Vermeer  and  Jan  Steen,  De  Hooch 
and  Ruisdael,  Hals  and  Rembrandt,  died. 
The  solitary  light  of  Watteau  was  barely 
kindled  ;  the  brilliant  but  facile  invention 
of  Tiepolo  was  yet  unknown.  The 
masters  who  flourished  in  that  twilight 
were  Benedetto  Gennari,  Carlo  Maratti, 
Conca,  Luca  Giordano,  van  der  Werff, 
the  younger  Mieris,  and  van  der  Meulen. 
It  was  a  sodden  and  dispirited  November. 
We  have  no  difficulty  in  recognising  that 
the  artists  who  appear  in  the  brown 


128  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


landscape  are  insignificant  compared  with 
those  who  graced  either  the  foregoing  or 
succeeding  summer.  But,  when  we  pit 
them  one  against  the  other,  these  fellow- 
bondsmen  in  a  fallow  time,  our  Godfrey 
Kneller  comes  well  out  of  it. 

And  as  we  see  him  in  the  long  perspec- 
tive of  the  British  school,  what  is  his  rank 
and  what  his  special  part  in  its  develop- 
ment ?  If  at  his  best  he  could  use  his 
tools  as  well  as  Van  Dyck,  he  never  showed 
the  sense  of  breeding  and  spirit  which  are 
that  master's  greatest  asset.  Nor  did  he 
ever  trouble  to  suggest  that  he  could  put 
forth  any  of  Van  Dyck's  energy  and 
invention  as  colourist  and  designer.  Van 
Dyck,  the  Fleming,  was  an  aristocrat  in 
art ;  Lely,  the  Dutchman,  was  bourgeois 
and  solid ;  Kneller,  the  German,  was  quite 
as  plebeian  as  Lely,  but  less  solid.  In 
every  way  he  seems  a  colder-blooded 
creature.  Lely,  as  we  have  seen,  could 
convincingly  express  in  his  rather  heavy- 
handed  way  the  sensual  attractiveness  of 
women.  But  Kneller  showed  no  ability 
in  this  direction,  partly  because  of  his 
more    phlegmatic    temperament,  and 


Quality  of  the  Artist 


129 


partly,  I  think,  because  he  was  not 
interested  enough.  In  technical  qualities, 
again,  he  seems  a  colder  fish,  in  that  he 
does  not  reveal  that  appreciation  of  rich 
paint  which  is  so  remarkable  in  Lely. 
On  the  other  hand  his  touch  was  lighter 
and  his  sense  of  quality  more  subtle. 

Just  as  he  cannot  compare  with  Van 
Dyck  in  charm  and  breeding,  so  is  he 
inferior  in  this  respect  to  Reynolds, 
Gainsborough,  Romney  and  Raeburn. 
They  seldom  experienced  difficulty  in 
painting  ladies  and  gentlemen.  But 
Kneller's  best-born  sitters  seldom  bear 
what  we  recognise  as  the  authentic  stamp. 
One  complication,  as  already  noted,  is 
that  Kneller's  people  are  not  really 
English  in  look,  a  fact  which  makes  them 
appear  remote  from  our  conception  of  our 
aristocracy.  Whether  they  more  nearly 
resemble  the  German  noblesse  of  Kneller's 
day,  I  have  not  ascertained.  But  in 
studying  even  Lawrence's  portraits  we 
recognise  our  fellow  countrymen,  who 
seem  surprisingly  like  our  contemporaries. 
Silly  and  insipid  they  may  often  seem,  or 
weak  andjanderbred  ;  but  they  are  people 


130  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


we  know.  Their  very  silliness  and  in- 
sipidity are  modern  ;  we  see  all  round 
us  many  chips  of  the  same  block.  But 
Kneller' s  people  are  unlike  anyone  familiar 
to  us  ;  they  speak  another  language  ; 
their  type  has  vanished.  And  we  are  the 
more  conscious  of  a  sudden  break  because 
we  regard  Kneller  as  immediately  prece- 
dent to  Reynolds,  whose  people  are  so 
conspicuously  modern  that  we  readily 
respond  to  their  moods.  Of  course,  a 
closer  study  of  English  eighteenth-century 
portraiture  shows  us  a  transition  period 
between  Kneller  and  Reynolds,  which 
eases  the  break.  But  if  we  go  straight 
from  the  former  to  the  latter  we  leap  the 
wide  gulf  dividing  seventeenth- century 
portraiture  from  late  eighteenth  :  a  feat 
which  lands  us  in  an  entirely  different 
country.  What  the  social  causes  of  this 
difference  were  we  cannot  discuss  here. 
Why  in  so  short  a  time  we  reach  so 
different  a  conception  must  be  explicable. 
Why  almost  suddenly  it  became  the 
painter's  concern  to  depict  the  intimate 
life  of  his  sitters,  the  aspect  they  showed 
to  their  friends  rather  than  the  solemn 


Quality  of  the  Artist  131 


face  they  turned  to  the  public  :  why,  in 
short,  playfulness  and  unguarded  moods 
passed  into  the  portrait  painter's 
currency  somewhere  about  1750  must 
have  a  reason.  But  all  we  are  here  con- 
cerned with  is  that  Kneller,  separated 
only  by  some  thirty  years  from  this 
modernity,  revealed  none  of  these  things. 

To  gauge  his  and  Lely's  positive  part 
in  the  history  of  English  painting  we  need 
simply  consider  what  it  would  have  done 
without  them.  There  can  be  no  doubt 
that  without  Lely  to  succeed  Van  Dyck, 
painting  in  England  would  have  stagnated 
and  decayed.  It  is  futile  to  argue  that 
but  for  Lely's  predominance  a  truly 
native  school  would  have  developed  and 
struck  out  independently.  We  must 
stick  to  facts.  At  Van  Dyck's  death  and 
during  the  next  forty  years  there  was  no 
painter  in  England,  save  Lely,  strong 
enough  to  carry  on  the  great  tradition  of 
craftsmanship  without  which  no  school 
can  prosper.  Certain  painters,  like  Riley 
and  Michael  Wright,  were  more  sensitive  : 
but  their  gifts  in  that  direction  were 
counterbalanced  by  their  limitations  as 


132  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 

draughtsmen,  colourists  and  designers.  It 
is  true  that  Lely's  art  was  not  the  kind 
that  founds  a  vital  movement  and  pro- 
motes a  great  rebirth.  Such  things  did 
not  crop  up  towards  the  close  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  that  unregenerate 
period  of  disillusioned  apathy,  fatigue  and 
spiritual  sloth.  But  Lely  sustained  the 
standard  of  craftsmanship  and  kept  alive 
in  England  the  great  qualities  which  Van 
Dyck  had  assembled  and  bequeathed. 
Stern  draughtsmanship,  fine  colour  and  a 
grave  and  noble  use  of  paint  formed 
Lely's  bequest  to  Kneller. 

He  in  turn,  in  his  different  method,  kept 
the  flag  of  craftsmanship  flying  and  main- 
tained the  tradition  of  fine  work.  With- 
out his  standard  and  example,  art  in 
England,  from  1680  to  1750,  must  have 
dropped  to  a  level  from  which  recovery 
would  have  been  very  difficult.  But  with 
Kneller  there,  setting  the  pace  and, 
despite  deplorable  lapses,  generally  in- 
sisting on  the  probity  of  form  and  the  true 
science  of  painting,  his  own  disciples  and 
foreigners  like  Dahl,  one  and  all  achieved 
some  sort  of  science  and  soundness  and 


Quality  of  the  Artist  133 


kept  the  flame  alive.  Thus  Highmore  and 
Hudson  and  Hogarth  were  keyed  up  and 
ushered  in  the  new  movement  with  some- 
thing of  Kneller's  mastery.  None  will 
seriously  pretend  that,  had  Reynolds 
suddenly  appeared  in  an  environment  in 
which  craftsmanship  had  been  long  dead 
he  would  have  so  easily  attained  his 
position.  The  solid  stock  of  craftsman- 
ship on  which  from  time  to  time  Reynolds 
grafted  fresh  experiments  in  technique 
was  Knellerian,  though  at  no  time  was 
his  science  of  draughtsmanship  or  paint 
as  sound  as  Kneller's. 

The  ways  of  art  seem  unaccountable. 
We  cannot  clearly  say  what  determines 
the  manifestation  of  genius  or  of  those 
clusters  of  outstanding  talent  which  now 
and  then  amaze  us.  In  our  particular 
case,  what  controlled  the  difference  in 
quality  between  Lely  and  Kneller  on  the 
one  hand,  and  Reynolds  and  Gains- 
borough on  the  other  ?  All  that  we  can 
be  sure  of  is  that  it  wras  not  accident,  and 
that  sound  laws  conditioned  the  quality 
of  each.  Attentive  study  of  biology, 
psychology  and  environment  might  tell 


134  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


us  more.  But  in  the  meantime  we  may 
perhaps  let  it  go  at  this  :  thanks  to  their 
position  in  the  strata  of  history,  Lely  and 
Kneller  were  excluded  from  the  company 
of  the  great  artists  ;  wide  sympathy, 
profound  perception,  discovery  were 
denied  them.  But  in  a  time  of  general 
laxity,  corruption  and  rank  growth  they 
at  least  preserved  the  great  tradition  of 
stern  draughtsmanship  and  beautiful 
quality  in  paint ;  so  that  when  a  more 
fortunate  and  gifted  era  broke,  its 
exponents,  trained  in  that  tradition, 
could  straightway  enter  into  their  birth- 
right. 


APPENDIX  I 


Portraits  by  Kneller  in  English  Galleries 
open  to  the  Public 

National  Gallery. 

John,  Marquess  of  Tweeddale  (3272) 

National  Portrait  Gallery. 

Arnold   Jocst   van   Keppel,    First    Earl  of 

Albemarle  (1625) 
William  Russell,  First  Duke  of  Bedford  (298) 
William  Congreve  (67) 

William,  First  Earl  Cowper  (painted  in  1722) 

(1228) 
John  Gay  (622) 

Charles  Montagu,  Earl  of  Halifax  (800) 
John  Howe  (265) 
James  II.  (painted  in  1684-5)  (666) 
Sir  Godfrey  Kneller,  Bart.  (1365) 
Anthony  Leigh  (1280) 

Thomas  Parker,    First   Earl  of  Macclesfield 

(painted  in  1 714)  (799) 
John  Churchill,  First  Duke  of  Marlborough 

(sketch)  (902) 
James  Scott,  Duke  of  Monmouth  and  Buccleuch 

(1566) 

John,  Baron  Somers  (490) 

John  Smith,  Engraver  (273) 

Anne  Churchill,  Countess  of  Sunderland  (803) 

Sir  Christopher  Wren  (113) 

Henry  Sidney,  E.  of  Romney  (1722) 


*35 


136  Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 


Hampton  Court. 

Lady  Diana  de  Vere,  Duchess  of  St.  Albans 
William  III.  landing  at  Margate,  1697 
Lady  Mary  Bentinck,  Countess  of  Essex 
Carey  Fraser,  Countess  of  Peterborough 
Lady  Margaret  Cecil,  Countess  of  Ranelagh 
Miss  Pitt,  afterwards  Mrs.  Scroop 
Lady  Isabella  Bennet,  Duchess  of  Grafton 
Lady  Mary  Compton,  Countess  of  Dorset 
Lady  Middleton 

Marie  Beatrix  of  Modena,  Queen  of  James  II 


Greenwich  Hospital. 

Admiral  George  Churchill  (16) 
Rear-Admiral  Sir  Thomas  Dilkes  (47) 
Admiral  Sir  George  Byng  (61) 
George  Prince  of  Denmark  (69) 
Vice-Admiral  John  Graydon  (136) 
Vice-Admiral  John  Benbow  (141) 
Vice-Admiral  Sir  Stafford  Fairborne 
(143) 

Admiral  Sir  John  Balchen  (154) 


c.  1700 
to 
1705 


Victoria  and  Albert  Museum. 
Portrait  of  the  Artist 


Liverpool  (Walker  Art  Gallery). 
Lady  and  Child 


Portraits  Painted  in  the  Studio  of  Sir 
Godfrey    Kneller,    or    Copies  after 
Kneller,  in  the  National  Portrait 
Gallery 

Thomas  Betterton  (752) 

John    Sheffield,    Duke    of    Buckingham  and 

Normandy  (1779) 
Barbara  Villiers,  Duchess  of  Cleveland  (427) 
James  Craggs  (the  younger)  (1134) 


Appendix  137 


Charles  Sackville,  Sixth   Earl  of  Dorset  and 

Earl  of  Middlesex  (250) 
John  Drvden  (831) 
George  I  (488) 
George  I  (544) 

Sidney,  First  Earl  of  Godolphin  (1800) 

John  Locke  (by  J.  Closterman,  after  Kneller) 

("4) 

John  Locke  (550) 

Heneage  Finch,  First  Earl  of  Nottingham  (1430) 
Robert  Hurley,  Earl  of  Oxford  and  Mortimer 
(16) 

Charles  Talbot,  Duke  of  Shrewsbury  (1424) 
Charles,  Second  Viscount  Townshend  (1755) 
John  Wallis,  D.D.  (578) 
Isaac  Watts,  D.D.  (264) 

Portraits   on  Loan  to  Other  Departments 
Joseph  Addison  (283) 

Charles,  Second  Viscount  Townshend  (1363) 


APPENDIX  II 


List  of  Works  on  the  Life  and  Art  of 
Sir  Godfrey  Kneller 

Walpole's  Anecdotes,  1828  Edn.,  iii,  pp.  216-235. 

D.N.B.,  xxxi,  p.  240. 

Bryan's  Diet.  Painters,  iii,  p.  140. 

Encyclop.  Brit.,  Eleventh  Edn.,  xv,  p.  850. 

Great  Britain  and  Ireland,  by  Sir  W.  Armstrong 

(Ars  Una  Series),  p.  174. 
Lely  and  the  Stuart  Portrait  Painters,  vol.  ii,  by 

C.  H.  Collins  Baker. 
Wurzbach.      Niederldndisches  Kunstlerlexikon, 

i,  pp.  296,  298. 


Printed  in  Great  Britain  by  Mackavs  Ltd.,  Chatham. 


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